Date: Sun, 20 Aug 1995 06:17:06 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: ports@freebsd.org Subject: `make info'? Message-ID: <3688.808924626@time.cdrom.com>
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I think it's finally come to pass that we have too many ports.. :-) No, I'm not saying we need less - this is great! However, we now have too many to really make it easy to know what's available at a glance. For example, let's pretend for a moment that I'm a first-time user of the ports collection and I just want to get a feel for what it can offer me, so I cd to /usr/ports and do an ls: CVS benchmarks emulators net shells GUIDELINES cad games news sysutils INDEX comms graphics packages utils LEGAL databases japanese plan9 x11 Makefile devel lang print archivers distfiles mail russian audio editors math security Hmmm. Looks reasonably self-documenting so far - I can get a pretty good idea of what's available just by looking at all these nifty categories. Ah! I'm interested in emulators! Go to emulators and do an ls: CVS cpmemu hfs pcemu vmsbackup Makefile cpmtools mtools tkhfs wine Huh. the cpm* stuff is pretty obvious, as is vmsbackup I suppose, but tkhfs? mtools? wine? What are those? Where's the README? Sure, all of us know what those things are since we're familiar with the ports collection, but the first-timer? No, it's actually somewhat confusing, in fact! I think it's time that we considered this, and I have two quick suggestions just off the top of my head (there may be better ones of course): 1. Build an auto-generated README file at each level of the tree that's *human readable* as well as the INDEX at the top (which, someday RSN, I'll write a utility for actually using :-). 2. Add another target called `info' or something suitably mnemonic to the ports structure so that the user can type `make info' at any level of the tree to get a human readable dump of what's there. Document this option, along with other useful ones like `all' and `install' (we should never assume that the user just knows what to do), in a top level README and hope that the user is at least reasonable enough to read that first. Whatcha think, Satoshi? Jordan
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