From owner-freebsd-ports Mon Nov 11 15: 8:41 2002 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 7118A37B401 for ; Mon, 11 Nov 2002 15:08:40 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail.rpi.edu (mail.rpi.edu [128.113.22.40]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E5D3F43E4A for ; Mon, 11 Nov 2002 15:08:39 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from drosih@rpi.edu) Received: from [128.113.24.47] (gilead.netel.rpi.edu [128.113.24.47]) by mail.rpi.edu (8.12.1/8.12.1) with ESMTP id gABN8ZEs073070 for ; Mon, 11 Nov 2002 18:08:35 -0500 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: drosih@mail.rpi.edu Message-Id: Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2002 18:08:34 -0500 To: freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG From: Garance A Drosihn Subject: Thinking about PORTCOMMENTS Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.3 (www dot roaringpenguin dot com slash mimedefang) Sender: owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org This is a vague idea which has been bouncing around my head for awhile, but I haven't forced myself to find the time to produce the "proof of concept" to show what I mean. Still, the recent pain with PORTCOMMENT reminded me about my idea, and I thought I might as well mention the idea. Why should we keep trying to stuff more and more things into 'make' variables in the Makefile for a port? I understand the advantage of having fewer files, so we want to put more information into the Makefile, but does that information really have to be done as 'make' variables? How about if we did it as some kind of fake-XML? "fake" XML in that the first character of each line would be a comment character, so that 'make' would ignore the lines. Then we could have things like: # # # blah blah blah # # Is the value of the proposed PORTCOMMENT value actually used in any make-targets? Or is it just read by some program to generate HTML pages? (...this is the part that I should have investigated more...). If it is not used in any commands which are generated by some make target, then I think it would be easier & better if we tried some kind of "fake XML" approach. -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-ports" in the body of the message