building a port with very long list of build options

[Robert Bonomi]

> From owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org  Thu Apr 21 22:45:24 2011
> Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2011 20:17:31 -0700
> From: Carl <k0802647 at telus.net>
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: building a port with very long list of build options
>
> Let's say I want to build a port for which I need to specify a huge 
> number of build options (eg. ghostscript). In my case I am 
> cross-compiling on an amd64 host for what will be a NanoBSD i386 target, 
> but I don't think that's important here. The scenario precludes using 
> the familiar configuration menu. The problem is that the desired list of 
> options far exceeds what would be sane to specify on the 'make' command 
> line. In fact, it apparently even exceeds what typical text editors 
> tolerate when trying to enter the line in a shell script. What is the 
> recommended solution?

One *can* use a script with an 'insanely long' set of options, by the
sinple expedient of using  "\"  to continue the list on the next line.

In fact, when I make a script-file for building something with lots
of options, I usually, fore 'readability'  put each option on a separate 
line.  e.g.:

    ./Configure \
     --option_001 \
     --option_002 \
     --option_003 \
     --option_003 \
     ...
     ...
     --option_203 \

making _sure_ there is a blank line after the last option specification.