Markus Weissmann wrote:
What would be _very_ cool to solve this problem would be something Landon Fuller suggested: Some kind of inheritance for Portfiles. Then we could do a gtk2 port with a description, version, hashes, etc. and do a gtk2-quartz port which inherits from gtk2 but changes some directories (for avoiding file conflicts with gtk2) and some options (to enable quartz). If version X won't work for the inheriting port, it may overwrite the version key and the checksums.
Yes, the idea of multiple Portfiles per port was already brought up some time ago. This would also allow us to get rid of separate devel ports. At the moment they are rather useless for testing, because all dependencies would need to be on $foo-devel instead of the regular $foo. I the case of gtk2, I don't think it is a good idea to give the ports different names, because that will lead to problems with dependencies. For example, gtk2 and gtk2-quartz would be mutual exclusive and therefore you can only install one of them. It would be way better for specifying dependencies if both versions are available with the same name gtk2. Then the user could decide either to use quartz or not for dependents without changes needed on these port. With multiple Portfiles per port one could install the devel version for testing and link all dependencies which specify the regular port name with it. We would have better testing possibilities without the need for a unstable/stable tree separation. Regards, Rainer