Request for clarification: x11, quartz variants and precompiled ports

[wltb]

Recently, I wanted to switch to macports TeXLive. I noticed that even texlive +minimal has a lot of dependencies, and that installing would result in compiling a lot.

Since the machine is pretty ancient, I dug deeper and found I had to compile this much because -x11 +no_x11 +quartz is enabled in my variants.conf, and packages like ​cairo, ​glib2 or ​texlive-bin are only available pre-compiled with the x11 variant enabled (and for glib2, quartz and x11 are mutually exclusive).

This may or may not be related to #60511 , but is there a reason why the quartz variants are not pre-compiled for those packages? Should I stick with +x11 -quartz ATM, when I don't want to compile many packages on my machine?

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Each port is only built once by each buildbot builder with whatever variants are the defaults for that port. The only exception is the universal variant: ports are also built with the universal variant if that is a dependency of another port due to its set of supported architectures.

At some point we might want to add the capability to our buildbot system to selectively build some additional variants, and then to use that capability to build the quartz variants. I believe work on adding that capability was begun but it has not been tested by me nor deployed to the buildbot system.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Replying to ryandesign:

add the capability to our buildbot system to selectively build some additional variants

That's #52742.

and then to use that capability to build the quartz variants

A better choice might be to get rid of the x11 and quartz variants and make them separate ports; that's #63680.

[wltb]

I see. Seems it would be better if #63680 had been implemented, but as of now, I will try hard to avoid ports with a glib2 dependency.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

glib2 is a general purpose library so it is used by many ports.