portfile question concerning optional deps

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Mar 3, 2011, at 5:54 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
> That would be the opposite of the way that these works today, and I can't imagine wanting to go through all thousands of ports and switch this.

If it makes things better, it's worth it.

Most ports only use port: style dependencies any way...

I don't think it would be an extreme effort to change things (I'll even volunteer to do it in a couple of months when I can spend some extra time on this).

> I would rather educate port authors as to how to use them the way they work today, and improve the documentation if needed.

There's basically no documentation (the guide doesn't mention it, and the Portfile man page doesn't either).

> path:-style doesn't search $PATH; it looks for a file at a particular path specified in the dependency, i.e. path:/usr/bin/grep:grep or path:${prefix}/bin/grep:grep. If the path is not absolute, "${prefix}/" is prepended to it.
> 
> bin:-style searches bin_path.
> 
> lib:-style does something similar for libraries.

And this behavior is totally obvious? (I know you changed a bunch of your ports a while back because you didn't realize it works this way - and you're probably more informed than most port maintainers...)

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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