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Date:      Mon, 18 Dec 1995 19:37:16 -0500 (EST)
From:      Chuck Robey <chuckr@glue.umd.edu>
To:        FreeBSD-ports@FreeBSD.org
Subject:    a kvetch and a proposal
Message-ID:  <Pine.SUN.3.91.951218192422.14834A-100000@mocha.eng.umd.edu>

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First, the kvetch.  I tried to make color_xterm, after I made sure my 
ports sources were absolutely up-to-date, and it fails during patching, 
like this:

===>  Applying distributed patches for color_xterm-pl5
patch: **** can't cd to 
/usr/ports/x11/color_xterm/work/pub/R6untarred/xc/programs/xterm/: No 
such file or directory
*** Error code 1

Now, on to the proposal.  I often find myself remaking a particular port, 
one that I already have correctly installed, just to get at docs that are 
hidden in the dist files.  What I'd like is the ability to have the docs 
automatically installed somewhere for me, permanently.  It'd have to be 
an optional thing, because I suspect there's a lot of people who are 
either walking encyclopedias, or just don't care to clutter their disks.

Notice I'm NOT talking about the man files, I'm talking about READMEs and 
other things that are around in lots of our ports.

How about setting up something, so I can set an environmental variable in 
my shell, to cause docs to be copied to somewhere for me?  I could have a 
var named LOCAL_PORTS_DOC_LOCATION, which I'd set to something likely, 
like /usr/local/doc.  In any port that was correctly set up for it, a 
subdirectory of /usr/local/doc/<port-name> could be made, and all files 
that the port author designated as doc-file would be copied for me to 
this directory.  It could even have them all automatically gzipped (not 
sure about that, tho).

If I thought all the above was needless cluuter, I just wouldn't define 
the variable, and it wouldn't do any doc copying for me.  So this would 
probably have _no effect whatsoever_ if you didn't go out of your way to 
make it so.  In fact, until some of the ports were modified to support 
this, it'd not have any effect anyways.

Is this needless complication, or a useful feature?

============================================================================
Chuck Robey chuckr@eng.umd.edu -- I run FreeBSD on n3lxx and Journey2
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