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.

 

Background:

 

I have removed X11 from my laptop and am building (albeit slowly) and using applications that I used to run under X11 under Aqua or am using an Aqua-based (roughly) equivilent application. This has revealed a number of instances of ports assuming that X11 is installed on a Mac OS X box, when that assumition is or should be false, such as when the upstream project is supporting Quartz-only builds, or when the project actually only really cares if GTK+ is installed, but the port hauls in X-based dependencies anyway. Some ports even build both the X11 and Quartz libraries for the port, but then only advertize to subsequent and dependent builds only the Quartz library.

 

While working through this, I realized that we should assume that X11 is not available on a machine and that we should re-gin our ports to match that assumption. Right now the assumption for most ports is that X11 is installed on a machine, and that users would prefer items that provide both X11 and Quartz should always provide X11 versions and should only maybe provide Quartz versions.

 

Randall Wood

"The rules are simple: The ball is round. The game lasts 90 minutes. All the rest is just philosophy."