Bug in ports system's DISTFILES handling?

[Conrad J. Sabatier]

On Mon, 17 Jan 2005 14:57:02 -0800, Kris Kennaway <kris at obsecurity.org>
wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 02:51:59PM -0500, Frank Laszlo wrote:
> 
> > This is quite possibly a bug. I took a lot at bsd.port.mk, and
> > DISTFILES is supposed to default to
> > ${PORTNAME}-${PORTVERSION}${EXTRACT_SUFX} Which is does, until you 
> > "append" something else to it, exactly what you are trying to do.
> > Other ports I'm looking at simply define the DISTFILES below the
> > MASTER_SITE. This is going to cause a warning in portlint, but hey..
> > what can ya do. I'm going to investigate further. Hope this was
> > helpful.
> 
> I don't think it's a bug, you're just trying to do something you can't
> do (mix DISTFILES with the "implicit" DISTFILES value computed by
> bsd.port.mk).  If you want to use a custom list of distfiles, define
> them *all* explicitly.
> 
> Kris

This just seems less than intuitive, if you ask me, especially given
that the += operator does work with other variables without requiring
the explicit definition of an initial value first.

I mean, if this were something that was consciously decided on, that's
one thing, but the lack of consistency would seem to indicate that it's
just not as well implemented as it could/should be.

I think it should be corrected, myself.

-- 
Conrad J. Sabatier <conrads at cox.net> -- "In Unix veritas"