A new and better way to do "make readmes"?

[Conrad J. Sabatier]

I've been thinking for a long time that we need a better way to do
"make readmes", one that would be properly integrated into our
ports Mk infrastructure, to take advantage of make's ability to
recognize which files are up-to-date and which really do need
rebuilding.

I like to make sure my README.html files are all up-to-date after my
nightly ports tree update, but with the current scheme, that means
either rebuilding *all* of the files in the tree, or (as I'm doing at
present) using some sort of "kludgey" (kludgy?) workaround.

I haven't actually started working on such an alternative method yet,
because I didn't want to dedicate the time to such an effort without
first checking to see how well it might be received by portmgr.

I realize this might possibly entail a less-than-trivial change to our
existing ports Mk infrastructure.  Would the overhead incurred in terms
of additional dependency lines mean the idea would most likely be nixed
right out of the gate?  I'd like to think that, if properly implemented,
the impact would be negligible, and the potential benefits would make
it well worthwhile.

Thanks for any feedback,

Conrad

-- 
Conrad J. Sabatier
conrads at cox.net