On Nov 30, 2007, at 05:10, Randall Wood wrote:
I would like to suggest that the variants +quartz and +x11 should be supported where relevant, eliminating the use of the +no_x11 variant:
+quartz Enable building the port to render graphics using the quartz engine and aqua user interface +x11 Enable building the port to use X11
Furthermore, I would like to suggest that these variants should never be default variants and that we should modify the macports base to recognize that a port has these variants and if neither is selected (either at the command line or in variants.conf) that an error message should be displayed explaining that the port may be installed with either: +quartz, +x11, or +quartz+x11, although some ports may result in unpredicatable behavior if +quartz+x11 is used.
Furthermore, I would like to suggest that the +no_x11 variant and the +no_quartz (if it is used at all) variants should be actively discouraged.
I wouldn't make this generalization. There are ports, like ImageMagick, that have a +no_x11 variant, which I believe should continue to have them. ImageMagick can build with support for some X11 things, or not. By default, we want to build the most featureful software possible, so X11 support is on by default. Users who do not wish this support can use the +no_x11 variant. I'm not aware of any Quartz support in ImageMagick. Unless you would like to redefine our default installation goals to no longer be "most featureful" but instead be "most featureful excluding X11 things". I'm not saying we should or should not redefine this, just point out what our current status is, and that you seem to be proposing a change to that. Actually, I guess our current guidelines are to build a port to be the most featureful while not including huge libraries as dependencies which most users won't want. Thus far, I think we've had an unspoken agreement that the X11 features are useful, and indeed our installation docs require the user to install X11 and the X11SDK. I guess you're proposing a change to that as well.