On Apr 23, 2007, at 13:21, N_Ox wrote:
Variants' names should be consistent, I don't think it's the case now: for example, libsdl-framework has a nostatic variant, whereas the expat's one is named no_static.
It would be nice to have some kind of naming guidelines for this kind of things.
"no_static" would be consistent with the ports I've used. (subversion: no_bdb; apr-util: no_bdb, no_sqlite; graphviz: no_x11; apache2: no_startupitem) But the ports I use may not be representative. Upon further investigation, there seems to be considerable variation, no pun intended: $ cat */*/Portfile | awk '/^variant/ { print $2 }' | sort | grep -E '^ (no|with|(en|dis)able)' | uniq -c 1 disable_debugging 1 disable_extra_encodings 1 disable_gimp2 1 disable_gnomedb 1 disable_localbackends 1 disable_ofx 1 disable_utf8mac 1 enable_cp932fix 1 enable_debugging 1 enable_geldkarte 1 enable_gnomedb 1 enable_pnmbackend 1 enable_python 1 enable_tests 2 no-crypto 1 no-gdbm 1 no-hooks 1 no-iconv 1 no-ipv6 1 no-multibyte 1 no-plus-plus 1 no-shared 1 no-slib 1 no-symgc 1 no-symslot 1 no-threads 1 no-zlib 1 noWildcards 1 noWinscpCompat 7 no_bdb 1 no_hiragino 1 no_lzo 5 no_neon 1 no_otf 1 no_pcre 1 no_pinentry 2 no_server 1 no_sqlite 8 no_ssl 2 no_startupitem 1 no_static 1 no_tcl 8 no_x11 1 no_zlib 1 nobanner 1 nocm17a 1 nocompat 1 noext0 1 nofmult 1 nojpnmes 1 nolibsigsegv 2 nomail 1 nonstd 1 noogg 2 noopengl 1 nopwd 1 norwegian 1 nosplash 1 nostatic 1 nosyslog 2 nothreads 1 nox 3 nox11 2 with-gnome 1 with_csound 7 with_default_names 7 with_doxygen 1 with_gcc34 1 with_gcj34 1 with_gnome 1 with_gphoto2 1 with_libthai 1 with_pdfkit 1 with_poppler 1 with_svg 1 without-gnome 1 without-libofx 2 without_docs 1 without_gimp 2 without_gnome 2 without_hbci 1 without_kpathsea 1 without_libexif 2 without_ofx 1 without_python 2 without_quotes 1 without_sdk Variants with a "-" in the name are ill-advised and should be changed, because the "-" is a special character in some circumstances. The "enable_", "disable_", "with_" and "without_" variants were a naming convention suggestion made on the list some time ago about which no real consensus seems to have been reached. I myself don't understand what benefit those would offer over the less-rigid variant naming more commonly in use now.
Why not an equivalent of the use.desc file of Gentoo's Portage package manager which would provide some kind of global variants?
I'm not familiar with how Gentoo handles this. Could you tell us?