Optional patching?

[Doug Barton]

Paul Schmehl wrote:
> I have an interesting situation.  I maintain the security/barnyard port. 
> It's used for several things, one of which is sguil.  (I'm working on 
> new ports for that as well.)  Barnyard includes a plugin for sguil, 
> named op_sguil.plugin.
> 
> The sguil developers have changed the way they gather data for the 
> newest release, 0.6.x.  The new release requires that you patch barnyard 
> to update the op_sguil.plugin.  However, people who are still running 
> the older versions of sguil; 0.5.x cannot use the new, patched version 
> of the op_sguil.plugin.
> 
> My question is, is it possible to make a patch optional? 

Yes, that information is in the porter's handbook:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/index.html

However, given the situation you described, I would suggest that you instead 
add a new port for "barnyard plus squil support" as a slave to the barnyard 
port, and include the patch there. Don't forget to add CONFLICTS to each as 
appropriate.

hth,

Doug

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