./options-descr file suggestion for ports

Kirill Ponomarew krion at voodoo.bawue.com
Sat Jun 9 21:03:12 UTC 2007


On Sat, Jun 09, 2007 at 09:36:51AM -0700, David Southwell wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Would it be possible , when a port has options,  to ask porters if they would 
> consider the merits/demerits of adding:
> 
> 1. An ./options-descr file in the port directory that describes  the options, 
> their purpose and any notes about an option
> 
> Reasons:
> This would be extremely useful for anyone not familiar with the port to help 
> in the task of choosing which options to install. 
> 
> I realise that this would depend upon whether maintainers are willing to add 
> an additional task to the already heavy burden they undertake. Maintainers 
> who are willing to consider this idea but are reluctant to prepare the notes 
> themselves but do not have the time or are for any reason reluctant to do so, 
> could invite users to submit notes for incorporating in ./options-descr.
> 
> By way of example I am just installing www/ruby-gem-rails and had no immediate 
> idea whether or not to add fastcgi support without trying to find out whether 
> it is or is not needed when one has mod_ruby installed and
> LoadModule ruby_module libexec/apache/mod_ruby.so
> in httpd.conf. A brief note in a ./options-descr could be very helpful, 
> especially for some ports where the options are sometimes numerous and not 
> always completely documented.
> 
> A little bit of intial guidance about options would be most helpful to a 
> system administrator who is not necessarily familiar with the a specific 
> port.

That's what ports/KNOBS supposed to be, see rev. 1.1 by ahze:

Limitations to KNOBS: In the future we plan to add support for
OPTIONS to support the KNOBS file, and so dialog(1) will be able to
handle the size of each knob knob-name's are limited to 12
characters and knob-descriptions are limited to 45 characters, not
including the white space between the knob-name and
knob-description.

Though, I don't know when OPTIONS support to KNOBS will be added.

-Kirill


More information about the freebsd-ports mailing list