Suggested improvements for ports

[RW]

On Sat, 12 Jan 2008 13:28:19 -0800
Doug Barton <dougb at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> Dominic Fandrey wrote:
> > As the ports man page states:
> > 
> > # make config-recursive
> > 
> > does what you want. It's surprising how often people claim this
> > feature is missing, even though it has been there ever since I
> > started using FreeBSD.
> 
> And it's surprising how often people don't listen when I explain that 
> config-recursive is not a complete solution. :) It builds the list 
> first, so that if you enable an option that creates a dependency on 
> another port it will be missed. 

Whilst this is a little irritating, and it would be nice to have it
fixed, in practice it's not all that much of a problem. 

When installing a new port, you can simple run  config-recursive twice
(or until there's a clean pass).  When configuring multiple origins
from a script it's better to handle the recursion externally anyway,
because even if config-recursive were fixed it would still be deeply
inefficient.