[RFC] NO_INSTALL in meta-ports considered harmful

[Glen Barber]

On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 2:51 PM, Marcin Wisnicki
<mwisnicki+freebsd at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 10 May 2009 13:08:56 -0400, Glen Barber wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure if this is the 'right answer', but NO_INSTALL allows the
>> proper installation of numerous ports from one location (the meta-port).
>>  An example of this is the misc/instant-server port (though
>> unmaintained, IIRC).
>>
>> If you remove the NO_INSTALL line from the Makefile, 'make' thinks
>> misc/instant-server should be installed, rather than the collection of
>> ports it is intended to install.
>
> They will be installed since they are run dependencies.
>

>From what I can tell (from several metaports) -- they, themselves, are
not installed.  The ports defined in the metaport are installed.

There is no source code for, using your example, CUPS[1].  CUPS (in
the FreeBSD ports tree) is, for lack of a better explanation, a
pointer to which specific ports you need to have in order to get a
fully operation CUPS system running.  Looking at the Makefile for
print/cups [2] you can see the dependencies and that CUPS is not
actually built (which in definition is what makes this a metaport).

[1] http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/pds.cgi?ports/print/cups
[2] http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/print/cups/Makefile?rev=1.43

-- 
Glen Barber