ports and interactivity

[Ian A. Tegebo]

I'm interested in knowing several things:

	1 When is a port interactive?
	2 Is there an easy way to determine the above?
	3 What are all the options for a given port?

After doing some reading, I understand that one can learn about options
in Makefiles, running "make show-config", "make show-options", or some
other idiosyncratic method that seems to vary from port to port.

In terms of question 1, there seems like there should be a
"IS_INTERACTIVE" variable set in the Makefile but in the example of
shells/bash-completion, there is no such variable and yet I was 
presented with what I imagine was "dialog" prompting me to choose
between bash2 and the newer bash3 (default shells/bash).

I have a hidden agenda here.  I would like to be able to present
portupgrade with a list of ports, preprocess all interactive ports
before any actual building occurs, and then let portupgrade do its
thing.  

Now, I could use the "BATCH" variable to at least process all
ports that aren't interactive but that hardly seems cool when there
could be dependencies that are interactive (which would show up when I
pass -rRn to portupgrade).

I've also taken a cursory look at portmanager and portmaster but neither
seem to fulfill my agenda.  It's not that I want to simply achieve
automation, I want to do all the human work of evaluating options and
making decisions up front (without all the tedious work of poking around in 
Makefiles when there are already nice things like those dialog prompts).

Has anyone gone down this road?  Does it not go anywhere?  Is there a
better way to do this?  

--
Ian Tegebo