Need help disabling (re-)configure step

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

I've been trying for some time to ge graphics/gthumb installed on
my 7.0-RELEASE system and it just ain't workin' and it's becoming
_very_ frustrating.

Basically, gthumb requires avahi-app, which (for as yet unexplained
reasons) won't even properly go through the configure step on my
system.  (See: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=140563.)

I've just sent off some more information to the maintainer(s) of
the avahi-app port, and I hope that, eventually, a correct fix becomes
available for this problem, but I'd really prefer not to wait
around in the hopes that (eventually?) a fix for this is forth-
coming.

So anyway, I've found that if I just take the ./configure command as
it appears in the config.log file, and edit it to remove this option:

   --with-dbus-system-socket=unix:path=/var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket

replacing that instead with:

   --disable-dbus --disable-gdbm

then I can at least get the bleepin' thing to configure properly.  (It
appers that it subsequently dies during the actual build, but let me
worry about that part.)

So anyway, the good news is that I know how to at least get this thing
to configure without dying during the execution of ./configure.

The bad news is that once I do that, if I cd back up two levels (../..)
and then just try to do "make", for some reason the ports building system
insists on re-running the configure step again, thus wiping out my
adjustments which allowed avahi-app to at least finish the pre-build
configure step.

So, could somebody please tell me how to suppress this behavior?  Why is
it the case that when I am cd'd into /usr/ports/net/avahi-app and when I
then type "make", the bleedin' thing forces a re-run of the ./configure
step, even though I have already done that manually.

A little help would be appreciated.