make describe problems - kde

[Frank Corrao]

Recently a number of ports began including lines such as this:

 .include "${PORTSDIR}/x11/kde3/Makefile.kde"

When one runs 'make describe' on such a port, perhaps indirectly by
calling portsdb -Uu, make describe [expectedly] will error out if this
file doesn't exist.

I currently maintain a number of headless systems which have no use for
x11, kde, or any of the ports that depend on it.  I therefore only cvsup
the ports directories that i'm interested in - not x11, etc.  However,
since many ports in the directories I *do* care about (converters, comms,
etc) contains ports that depend on kde, make describe and thus portsdb -Uu
fails for me when it reaches a port that depends on kde.  I see 3 possible
fixes to this problem:

1)  I could start cvsuping the x11 and other ports directories even though
i'll never use anything in them.  This would be ugly and inefficient.

2)  portsdb could be made smarter so as to ignore errors from ports whose
include files are missing.

3)  A knob could be set in /etc/make.conf for those not interested in any
KDE or X11 ports - NO_X11? NO_KDE?

Thoughts?

Frank
-- 
"If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the
 process of putting them in." -- Dijkstra