alternative options for ports

[Wesley Shields]

On Thu, Oct 14, 2004 at 10:11:42AM -0400, Frank Laszlo wrote:

> I just had a thought about this whole thing. I know a lot of users feel 
> intimidated by the Makefile's in ports,
> and would not dare open one up in an editor. Even if they did, they 
> wouldnt understand it fully. so what if
> the ports had a target that listed possible options within the Makefile, 
> and what exactly they did. Maybe
> this would require another file in the ports, like 'pkg-options' It 
> would be formated something like this
> 
> WITH_SOMEFEATURE            Add so and so feature to the package.
> WITH_SOMETHINGELSE         This will create something here.
> 
> That way a user could just type something like 'make listoptions' and it 
> will give a nice list of build options
> for a specific port. Anyone have any feedback on this?
> 
> Regards,
>    Frank

Some ports already list their tunable option(s).  Check out net/gaim as
an example.  I do think that adding a listoptions target might be
helpful to those that are scared of opening up a Makefile and doing a
little learning.

-- WXS