From owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Sun Nov 16 09:40:11 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 82FFC16A4CE for ; Sun, 16 Nov 2003 09:40:11 -0800 (PST) Received: from heron.mail.pas.earthlink.net (heron.mail.pas.earthlink.net [207.217.120.189]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B36AB43FB1 for ; Sun, 16 Nov 2003 09:40:10 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from richardcoleman@mindspring.com) Received: from titan.criticalmagic.com ([68.213.16.23] helo=mindspring.com) by heron.mail.pas.earthlink.net with asmtp (Exim 3.33 #1) id 1ALQsc-00012P-00 for freebsd-ports@freebsd.org; Sun, 16 Nov 2003 09:40:10 -0800 Message-ID: <3FB7B686.5080904@mindspring.com> Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2003 12:40:22 -0500 From: Richard Coleman Organization: Critical Magic, Inc. User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-ELNK-Trace: 1ee258965991efcb0865379cdb43356e5e89bb4777695beb702e37df12b9c9ef726c50534df7e4f02099003986acf902350badd9bab72f9c350badd9bab72f9c Subject: listing the WITH_* variables for each package X-BeenThere: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list Reply-To: richardcoleman@mindspring.com List-Id: Porting software to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2003 17:40:11 -0000 One thing I always find annoying is the necessity to dig through the Makefiles to look at all the WITH_* variables that are available when compiling a port. I think there are a couple easy options to do something better here. 1. Have a suggestion in the porter's handbook to list them in pkg-descr. Along with each WITH variable would be a one line description. This would be very helpful and not much extra work. 2. Create another (optional) file such as pkg-options in each port. It would simply be a listing of the available WITH options and a one line description. Experimental or developer-only options could be left out or marked differently. This would also open additional automated build possibilities such as doing test builds with all possible subsets of the WITH variables (obviously this would be time consuming, but wouldn't need to be done very often). Either one of these methods could be incrementally implemented, and would be optional (but recommended). But it would be very helpful to many users. Richard Coleman richardcoleman@mindspring.com