On Jan 7, 2007, at 3:28 PM, belinda thom wrote:
How am I to know if I should be installing a port w/no extra variants used?
In particular, I want to install subversion, whose info is:
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32 % port info subversion subversion 1.4.2, devel/subversion (Variants: mod_dav_svn, no_neon, no_bdb, mac_os_x_server_mod_dav_svn, tools, darwin_7)
Unfortunately there's no simple, standard way to tell what variants one might want for any given port. It would be nice if MacPorts showed more context on a variant, but as far as I can tell, it's up to the given port maintainer. Sometimes when I'm faced with a similar question, I'll look at the actual port file to see if I can ascertain what a variant is doing: cat `port file subversion` I will say that from experience you will probably want +mod_dav_svn, as it provides access to WebDAV-hosted repositories, which includes many public SVN repos. I've tried building Subversion with +no_neon and +no_bdb, but it either caused problems later or didn't make any obvious difference. Here's a link to the Subversion website that should describe what "tools" means: http://subversion.tigris.org/tools_contrib.html --John