Setting make options permanently (WITHOUT_GNOME, etc)

[Andy Sparrow]

> Interesting. What happens when you upgrade?

It isn't affected.

> I don't think Mergemaster looks 
> at anything but /etc. Does the Makefile.local file ever get overwritten?

No, not that I've noticed.

> Or 
> when cvsupping?

Again, no. There's no Makefile.local in CVS, so it doesn't touch it in 
any way because it considers it a local file. As it should.

> I confess I'm not that happy with using pkgtools.conf.

Heh. Then you have an option :)

And I agree. Loading 100's of port-specific options into a file that's 
specific to 'portupgrade' isn't the Right Way (TM) IMHO. And should this 
file ever change (e.g. format) as a result of a change to 'portupgrade' 
itself, you've got a potential migration problem. Not to mention that 
the string quoting and format in this file is often unnecessarily 
convoluted.

I often want to build a port manually (e.g. outside portupgrade), 
tweaking configure and other options. So long as you initiate the make 
from the port's top-level, you'll pick up all your "regular" options 
without having to hunt them down.

Actually set out one evening to frob exactly this functionality (the 
Makefile.local mechanism) into the port makefile system (mostly because 
I like to upgrade my ports in batch mode, unattended), but discovered 
quite quickly whilst reading them that it had been there all along, just 
not advertised/documented (or, for that matter, ever mentioned on the 
mailing lists, AFAICS). Dunno why.

For some bizarre and inexplicable (at least to me) reason, everyone who 
bikesheds around Yet Another Way to provide persistant build options to 
ports completely ignores this extremely convenient, pre-existing and 
perfectly functional mechanism.

If I want to use BS dialogs[0] to configure things, I'll install Linux 
or Slowaris, thanks very much. I *like* setting stuff once in text 
files, and I *like* unattended, automatic, recursive-with-my-local-option
s ports upgrades[1] after my cvsup/build/installworlds.

Apparently, I am alone in this. It's even more puzzling, because I don't 
ever see it as mutally exclusive at all. But that's life. My systems 
work the way I want them to, YMMV.

Regards,

AS

[0] On which topic, the mplayer-skins port has been prompting twice via 
dialog for the skins to install for almost a year now, and other people 
have asked about it on this list, so I know I'm not imagining it :)

[1] And no, just setting 'BATCH=yes' doesn't cut it - then it just skips 
the ports that need configuration options, like Ghostscript, Postfix, 
SNMP etc. etc.