Request for Features: Ports Re-engineering

[Tom McLaughlin]

On Mon, 2007-12-17 at 11:42 -0300, Alejandro Pulver wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Dec 2007 07:48:07 -0600
> Stephen Montgomery-Smith <stephen at math.missouri.edu> wrote:
> 
<snip>

> 
> > On the other hand some ports really need to be built from a clean 
> > system.  Some of them autodetect ports that are already installed, and 
> > then change options appropriately.  (Maybe some of the multimedia ports 
> > like vlc do this.)  My guess is that this is to some extent unavoidable 
> > because the "configure" script in the port build process probably does 
> > this as well.  Anyway, perhaps this autodetecting of ports to provide 
> > options needs to be built into the system in a systematic manner.  Then 
> > robotic package builders could be trained to glean this information from 
> > the build tree (what you refer to as the DAG - is that "directed 
> > something graph"?).
> > 
> 
> Auto-detection is certainly avoidable. Some for example only enable
> detection of MMX/SSE/etc instructions when not building in
> pointyhat/tinderbox. IIRC ports should respect the users' choice, but
> it's not easy with the current OPTIONS handling (some have knobs that
> can be set to on/off/auto).
> 

I think he's referring to configure scripts which will build additional
functionality and link against additional libs if they are already
installed.  These are a major pain and at least for me caused a fair
amount of random breakage after updating ports.  I've since moved to
using a tinderbox to build all my packages and point my systems to that
PACKAGESITE.


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