Setting make options permanently (WITHOUT_GNOME, etc)

[Andrew Sparrow]

On Wed, Apr 02, 2003 at 05:43:02PM -0800, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 02, 2003 at 10:18:45PM +0000, Andrew Sparrow wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 02, 2003 at 12:15:30PM -0800, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> > > On Wed, Apr 02, 2003 at 12:14:19AM -0800, Andy Sparrow wrote:
> > > 
> > > > For some bizarre and inexplicable (at least to me) reason, everyone who 
> > > > bikesheds around Yet Another Way to provide persistant build options to 
> > > > ports completely ignores this extremely convenient, pre-existing and 
> > > > perfectly functional mechanism.
> > > 
> > > One of the design features of the ports collection is that it can be
> > > used read-only, e.g. mounted read-only via NFS.
> > 
> > I know thanks. I frequently update/install ports (and/or worlds,
> > for that matter) on my firewall that were built on a faster machine.
> > 
> > Other than the fact it's a little difficult for the port you're
> > installing to create .install_done.${PORT} on a R/O FS, it seems to
> > work fine.
> 
> That's what WRKDIRPREFIX is for.  Of course, WRKDIR is not persistent
> because it is deleted whenever you do 'make clean'.
> 
> > (and, IIRC, you may need to remove the .install_done file - from
> > the serving machine, naturally -  otherwise make thinks it doesn't
> > need to do anything).
> > 
> > >  Makefile.local cannot be used there.
> > 
> > I don't understand what you mean. The options in the file are used
> > to build the port.
> > 
> > If those options are not applicable to the machine on which you
> > install it, then that's as doomed an act on the user's part as
> > setting the CPU architecture to P4 on the building machine (e.g.
> > in make.conf) and then installing the resulting binaries on a 486.
> > 
> > Could you clarify your statement if I've misunderstood what you meant?
> 
> I meant that for people using a RO ports tree, Makefile.local in the
> port directory is not an option.  Given that this is a supported use
> of the ports collection, Makefile.local cannot be a general-purpose
> solution for storing local configuration state for the port.

Ah, I see what you're driving at now. I'd never actually considered
using a R/O ports tree and building ports locally with WRKDIRPREFIX.

Probably because my sole usage of a R/O ports tree (and I'd always
assumed, most peoples') is aimed at getting around two specific
problems:

i)	Lack of local disk space
ii)	Lack of local grunt

Thus, I build the port(s), dependancies etc with the desired options
on the "host", remove the .install_done flag, NFS mount it on the
target, cd into the appropriate port directory and do a "make
install" on the target. Naturally, this requires care when building
the port on the host machine - e.g. that CPU type and other options
are correctly set.

Perhaps I'm simply being unsophisticated and there's all kinds of
other wonderful things you can do, but it seems to me that (i)
above isn't actually being effectively addressed if you're building
from a R/O ports tree - because certain ports (and especially those
with honking dependancies) will use considerably more space to
build than the ports tree occupies anyway.

And in this scenario, problem (ii) (a significant factor on a 486
or P150 firewall/print/file/Samba/fax server with ~64MB memory and
slow local disks) is just not addressed at all.

Unless I'm missing something more fundamental (always possible),
this manner of usage doesn't seem too useful to me - although I
will grant that, for consistancy and managability, it is very nice
to use (e.g.) a CD of a ports tree snapshot and update all your
machines to/from the same vintage of everything.

It also still seems to me that Makefile.local will still work -
after all, it's above WRKDIR - however, it then takes on the flavor
of global, or site-wide, options settings on a port-by-port basis,
rather than the host-by-host that the name implies it was originally
intended to provide.

> > Some ports don't provide the ability to set build-time options
> > either via the Make command-line, make.conf, pkgconfig or
> > Makefile.local, they will instead implicitly start a dialog and
> > prompt the user to interact with them, halting the build.
> 
> I was talking about my patches which replace the ad-hoc dialog
> configurators in some ports.  They allow you to choose not to enter
> the configurator if you don't want to.

So one could run the configurator once, set any desired options to
local preferences and choose that it never come up again for that
port?

If so, that'd be ideal - when are you committing it? ;-)


Regards,

AS