HEADSUP: FLAVORS (initial version) and subpackages proposals

[Adam Weinberger]

> On 22 Dec, 2016, at 13:04, Baptiste Daroussin <bapt at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> 
> The clean way would be to to just have a new variable in a given port that
> describes the possible variations. But that would break all existing external
> tools that deals with the ports tree. Because they all rely on the fact that
> there is a mapping between a package name and an origin (not that pkg does not
> rely on that.

It's more than just cleaner; it improves the development workflow dramatically. Variable-based flavours can be added, modified, and removed easily. c/p/f may necessitate recopies and potentially tricky quarterly backports.

Flavours and subpackages are a big deal. I'd prefer that aging, non-actively-developed not drive design decisions. I feel like the flavour and subpackage omelettes are worth cracking those eggs for.

> So I decided to go another way: add a third level to the ports tree. So far we
> have category/port and I do propose to add a third level: category/port/flavor
> which will keep the paradigm most tools are expected: 1 packagename == 1 origin

They're not necessarily redundant: variable-based flavours provide for combinations of options, and 3rd-level ports provide a meaningful way to categorize nearly-identical ports (like textproc/aspell/{en,fr}). Personally I'd love to see both those things happen.

# Adam


-- 
Adam Weinberger
adamw at adamw.org
https://www.adamw.org