dev port or subport?

Lawrence Velázquez larryv at macports.org
Thu Sep 25 11:44:06 PDT 2014


On Sep 25, 2014, at 2:21 PM, Mark Brethen <mark.brethen at gmail.com> wrote:

> What is the accepted practice for dev ports? I'm porting a program that currently builds with fox but has the option of building with wxwidgets (i.e. doesn't require X11). The wx build doesn't have all of the features yet and should be considered under development. Should this be a separate port or subport? If subport, how do you set this up as conflicting with port name?

Subports are just an organizational tool. They're meant for cases where two separate Portfiles would share a significant amount of code. You could do something like this:

    PortSystem 1.0
    name foo
    version 1.23.45
    license TO_KILL

    [a lot of common code]

    subport foo {
        conflicts foo-wx
        [foo-specific code]
    }

    subport foo-wx {
        conflicts foo
        [foo-devel-specific code]
    }

If there isn't all that much shared code, you might be better off with separate Portfiles.

Ideally you'd also wrangle the builds so that the ports could be installed at the same time.

vq


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