How hard would it be to let variants have descriptions? I think the time has come for that feature to be implemented. Sometimes the single word or abbreviation comprising the variant name just really isn't enough information for the user to fully understand what the variant does. I have been trying to add descriptions to my ports' variants, in the comments in the portfile, but I would like to be able to display these to the user. I see two necessary steps: 1) Allow some (optional!) syntax within the variant to specify a description, like variant macplus { description Emulate a Macintosh Plus with 4 MB RAM and 6 drives ... } or variant macplus { variant_description Emulate a Macintosh Plus with 4 MB RAM and 6 drives ... } 2) Modify the display of "port info" to show the variant description, like $ port info minivmac minivmac 2.8.2, Revision 1, emulators/minivmac http://minivmac.sourceforge.net/ Mini vMac is a Macintosh emulator. It emulates the earliest Macs, from the original Mac 128K (built 1984-85) to the Mac SE (1987-1990). The default is to emulate a Mac Plus (1986-1990); this is also the best-tested and therefore recommended emulation. To use Mini vMac, you need a ROM file from the type of machine you're emulating. Mac ROMs are copyrighted by Apple, so you must extract the ROM from a real physical Mac that you own. Use the CopyROM program for this, which you can download from the Mini vMac web site (More > Extras). Variants: universal: Build a universal binary mac128k: Emulate a Macintosh with 128K RAM and 2 drives mac512k: Emulate a Macintosh 512K with 512K RAM and 2 drives mac512ke: Emulate a Macintosh 512Ke with 512K RAM and 6 drives macplus: Emulate a Macintosh Plus with 4 MB RAM and 6 drives macse: Emulate a Macintosh SE with 4 MB RAM and 6 drives Maintainers: ryandesign@macports.org Variants that have no description (i.e. all variants currently) would show up just like that, but with just the variant name and no colon afterward: Variants: universal mac128k etc. Note that I think the automatic platform variants like macosx and darwin_8 should not appear at all in port info. Comments?