On Jun 27, 2022, at 17:47, Nils Breunese wrote:
>
> I don’t maintain any ports with GUI’s myself, but I believe flavors like x11,
> sdl, etc. are usually provided as variants of a port instead of as subports.
> You can also specify conflicts between variants if there are any to avoid
> users installing conflicting variants. For instance the glib2 port contains
> 'variant x11 conflicts quartz { … }’.
Many ports currently use variants for this, yes, but partly that's because they
got done that way before the subport feature existed. Separate ports (whether
implemented as subports within a single Portfile or as separate Portfiles) are
better because, if done correctly, any number of those ports can be installed
simultaneously, and we can build binaries of them on our automated buildbot
system. (We only build ports' default variants.) This in turn is preferred by
users, who would rather not have to compile things from source just because
they want a different set of options compiled in.
The freeciv and freeciv-x11 ports are examples of this, and Chris has recently
indicated a desire to undertake the restructuring necessary to do the same
separation for glib, gtk, and everything depending on them; see
https://trac.macports.org/ticket/63680.
