Make depends_run yelp a variant for gnome apps?

[c.herbig@…]

Since yelp isn't technically needed to run the gnome apps, and since people are having a lot of problems with webkit-gtk, would it be better to make the yelp dependency a default variant that people can turn off?

[cooljeanius (Eric Gallager)]

Apparently yelp is used for help information in gnome, so it'd probably be more work than just removing the yelp dependency; it'd probably also involve patching everything to remove their help buttons... I agree though, yelp does have a long dependency tree, and some people might prefer to avoid it.

[cooljeanius (Eric Gallager)]

Cc Me!

[c.herbig@…]

It's actually rather simple to run without. Apps like gnumeric or gchempaint will simply throw an error message to the console stating that yelp cannot be found. You can click on help all you want, and simply nothing will happen. It's not ideal, but since webkit seems to be a bit temperamental, I thought it might spare a lot of people some confusion and error reporting.

Sorry, I looked again, it gives you a popup stating that yelp could not be found.

[cooljeanius (Eric Gallager)]

Replying to c.herbig@…:

Sorry, I looked again, it gives you a popup stating that yelp could not be found.

Could we add some text to the popup's message telling users to re-install the port they're using with the +yelp variant if they want its help button to work?

[c.herbig@…]

Replying to egall@…:

Could we add some text to the popup's message telling users to re-install the port they're using with the +yelp variant if they want its help button to work?

I don't know. I'm not sure what software level (gnumeric, goffice, gtk) provides that popup functionality.

[c.herbig@…]

I would like to cite #39880 as a reason that I believe supplementary programs like yelp should not be made dependencies when the main port is not technically dependent on them. User frustration leads people to simply give up on the software altogether.

Perhaps it would be better for MacPorts to adopt a 'recommends' or 'optional' metadata for portfiles, for the purpose of listing these optional but useful additional programs like yelp. This seems to be what certain linux distributions like archlinux do.

[evanmiller (Evan Miller)]

I'd like to revisit this issue. As of this writing, 44 ports depend on yelp at run-time:

​https://ports.macports.org/port/yelp/details/

webkit2-gtk is a massive dependency for otherwise small Gnome apps, and not available at all on PPC. PSPP works around the issue by providing a +help variant.

Maybe as a first step we could corral all the apps that require yelp into a PortGroup and then decide what the system-wide behavior should be. I personally would prefer some notes informing users that if they'd like an in-application Help menu, they will need to port install yelp. (This would only be displayed to users without Yelp already installed.) But we can settle on that later after getting the PG assembled.

[evanmiller (Evan Miller)]

In 83a337ce0fa7aa2820bfa7dfc6cb0aff97a8ea87/macports-ports (master):

yelp PG: new port group

See: #39886