alternative options for ports

[David O'Brien]

On Wed, Oct 13, 2004 at 12:38:40PM +0000, Eivind Eklund wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 12, 2004 at 03:51:01PM -0400, Frank Laszlo wrote:
> > I personally do not like dialog's in ports, period. It makes unattended 
> > builds a pain, mostly when compiling large ports with an extensive list 
> > of depends, you never know which dependency is going to pop up a dialog 
> > in the middle of an all-night build.

Hear, hear!

> Presently, you can set BATCH for your batch builds.  This already
> disables the option requesters, falling back to the old behaviour.

We should add a NO_OPTIONS option also.  As 'BATCH' does more than just
turn off OPTIONS.  ('BATCH' should of course imply 'NO_OPTIONS').

 
> We need to resolve the overall sitation around compile time
> configuration of FreeBSD ports.
..
> If you've got more *specific* problems with usability (like the batch
> build problem above), I'm very interested, as I'm trying to collect
> these for doing a new round of fixes for the options support in
> bsd.port.mk.

OPTIONS isn't the answer -- they don't do anything for 'pkg_add -r'
users.  Since we go to a *lot* of work building packages and making them
available there must be a huge number of consumers of them.  We should be
making more port variations.  vim-gtk, vim-kde, vim-athena, vim-motif for
instance.  That way a pkg_add user and get what they want.

-- 
-- David    (obrien at FreeBSD.org)