Port system "problems"

[Marcus von Appen]

Baptiste Daroussin <bapt at FreeBSD.org>:

> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 12:22:28AM +0200, Florent Peterschmitt wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I'm not a developer and I know how it's difficult to make a port (or
>> some ports, for example VirtualBox) but I think the port system has many
>> "problems":
>>
>> 1. Ports are not modular
> What do you mean by modular? if you are speaking about subpackages  
> it is coming,
> but it takes time

I hope, we are not talking about some Debian-like approach here (foo-bin,
foo-dev, foo-doc, ....).

>> 2. Option system is not really well documented
> What kind of documentation do you need?, please report what you are  
> expected so
> that we can improve it
>
>> 3. Some dependencies are totally useless
> Please report PR
>
>> 4. So slow...
> What is slow do you mean compiling is slow?
>
>>
>> Let me give some examples:
>>
>> 1. games/wesnoth should be splitted in games/wesnoth-bin and
>> games/wesnoth-datas. Why rebuild everything when just binaries needs ?
>
> This is coming, it takes lot of time, and some things have to be  
> done first, in
> the infrastructure that the user do not see much.

I do not see any necessity for infrastructure changes here - we did that
in the past for several ports (e.g. alephone, alienarena, ...).

>> 2. Why do we have to put WITH_NEW_XORG in /etc/make.conf to get it ? Why
>> not put this var in a port configuration file which will be read by all
>> ports needing this var ?
>
> Because this is not that easy, do you have a technical way to  
> propose? I think
> noone is really happy with the WITH_NEW_XORG, but this is the "less worse" :)
> way we found, if you have a better way to propose, please step up  
> and propose.

/etc/make.conf (or whatever to be included in /etc/make.conf) can be  
seen as port
configuration file that is evaluated by the ports. And each port picks  
those things,
it needs.

Cheers
Marcus