On Mar 23, 2007, at 11:10 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

On Mar 20, 2007, at 10:57, Elias Pipping wrote:

...

This is a serious problem btw. That "oh there's a universal variant, it'll surely work" thought, which is perfectly natural but doesn't work in this case. That's why

http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/macports/wiki/Universal

needs to be extended and made aware of. (alternatively, a port could be required to hold some keyword in order to allow for building with +universal. like 'build_universal yes' or something.

I think your wiki list is perhaps helpful right now, but not a viable long-term solution. I would want a solution that's completely contained within the MacPorts software.

It wasn't meant to be a standalone solution. A start rather. I'd like an infrastructure like the guys over at gentoo have it.[1] (without the wait for something to become stable, though, at least at first)

I would prefer a variable named something like "universal_works" or "universal_ok" which could be set to "yes" or "no". The default would be neither, more of an "I don't know" or "maybe" state. Ports where the maintainer has tried the +universal variant and believes it to work should have "universal_ok yes" added. Ports that have been tested and found not to work universally should be marked with "universal_ok no" (that's assuming they cannot be easily fixed to work universally). Anyone who tries to build a port that has neither marking would get a warning that the universal build is untested, and that they should let us know if they find that it works or doesn't work.

That's good for now, but it's only a short term solution as well, because it only says something about the universal variant whereas we need information about what works for every package on every supported platform with every variant (the variants will be ugly). [1] http://packages.gentoo.org/search/?sstring=bash Regards, Elias