variants containing variants

[jpm@…]

something like this would ease major variants with platform specific dependencies. consider a port with two variants: stable and unstable. it would be ideal to have those variants contain the necessary platform variants instead of duplicating them else where.

i am not even sure it would be possible to set the default variant to +stable then also have platform variants. by default +platform name will get picked up but that wouldn't help in this situation, one would still need to contain the other without a fair amount of hacking...

[kevin@…]

Variants within variants seems like it could easily turn into a large can of worms... I recommend carefully construction variants in the following manner:

variant darwin { # common darwin stuff for stable/unstable } variant darwin stable { # darwin stable stuff } variant darwin unstable { #darwin unstable stuff }

[landonf@…]

The compound variants & inherent system variants were added explicitly to deal with this and similar problems. Bringing variants into variants would quickly become a very entangled mess indeed.