Port system "problems"

[Marcus von Appen]

Matthew Seaman <m.seaman at infracaninophile.co.uk>:

> On 26/06/2012 12:07, Marcus von Appen wrote:
>>> Sub-ports should be much more efficient, as there's a lot of the work
>>> involved in installing which is a one-time thing when installing port
>>> plus some collection of sub-ports.
>
>> How does that look like in detail? Are there any concepts on about
>> how it is supposed to work, what the implications are, and so forth?
>
> Please understand that a lot of this stuff exists only in various
> people's heads and is subject to arbitrary change as ideas evolve.
> Other parts are more-or-less documented; some is already under
> development and may or may not require various degrees of revision in
> the light of experience.

I understand that quite well, but I fear that we miss to document it in the
long-term. When I started fiddling around with bsd.port.mk in my early days,
it sometimes was a pain to figure out, why code XYZ is in there and at which
point of time it is triggered for exactly what purpose.
Yes, I could have bugged those, who know, but I'd rather see that written
down somewhere, so others can start faster with less nagging (which includes
me, too, as someone to get started with writing things down :-).

Hence I would love to see some docs on the bigger things that are on the
doorstep, so that learning and understanding the overall system is less time
consuming. Plus, a documentation (draft) in e.g. the Wiki allows a broader
feedback and sharing of ideas without moving back and forth in the mailing
list history.

[long exaplanation of how the system is supposed to work]

 From what I understand, the whole magic happens in step 7-9. The port builds
as usual, installs itself in a fake root (stagedir) and packages are created
based on the relative paths, PORTEXAMPLES/DOCS, ... entries or plist
placeholders or whatever.

The maintainers are - if I got that right - completely off the hook with
modifying their ports to split them in some way or another, correct?

Do you mind to put your explanation into the Wiki (maybe using the StageDir
page, since this would better explain what the purpose of StageDir is)?

Cheers
Marcus