HEADSUP: FLAVORS (initial version) and subpackages proposals

[David Demelier]

2016-12-19 1:31 GMT+01:00 Baptiste Daroussin <bapt at freebsd.org>:
> Hi all,
>
> I have been working for a while on 2 long standing feature request for the ports
> tree: flavors and subpackages.
>
> For flavors I would like to propose a simple approach first which is more like a
> rework of the slave ports for now:
>
> Examples available here:
> https://reviews.freebsd.org/D8840 (with the implementation)
> and
> https://reviews.freebsd.org/D8843
>
> Design: introduce a 3rd level in the hierarchy and make it work a bit like slave
> ports
>
> pros:
> - all slave ports are self hosted under the same directory: easier for
>   maintenance
> - should work with all existing tools
>

This is what I really wanted for years especially for ports like spell
checker. Some are in dedicated categories such as french/aspell while
other are in textproc/<lang>-aspell and that's a big mess.

OpenBSD ports has something like textproc/aspell/<lang> and that is
very nice and clean. If the plan is to do the same, that is definitely
a major improvement.

> cons:
> - hackish: it is not really much more than a slave port
> - it adds plenty of new Makefiles :(
>
> I think anyway this is an improvement
>
> Next step after that is in would be to extend it to allow some dependency on "I
> depend on whatever flavor if port X"
>
> Subpackages:
> Design:
> Add a new macro MULTI_PACKAGES
> flag plist with an @pkg{suffixofthesubpackage} file
> the framework will split the plist into small plist and create all the packages
> All variables like COMMENT can be overridden with a COMMENT_${suffixofthesubpackage}
>
> pros:
> - simple and working almost now
> - allow to simplify lots of ports
> - options friendly (<optionname>_PACKAGE automatically appends a new entry to
>   MULTI_PACKAGES)
>

Also lovely as it will probably remove some packages that duplicate a
lot the ports tree (-nox11 for example). If I understood correctly
that one.

> Any comment?

Yes, make it real :)

And again, thanks for your amazing and regular good work bapt!

-- 
Demelier David