make describe problems - kde

[Kris Kennaway]

On Sun, Mar 07, 2004 at 06:41:39PM -0600, Mark Linimon wrote:
> On Sunday 07 March 2004 02:28 am, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> > Running 'make index' is not supported unless you have the full ports
> > collection.  There are just too many interdependencies to make it
> > practical to support building consistent indices with subsets of the
> > ports collection.
> 
> Coincidentally, I did a little research on this the other day, for
> similar reasons.
> 
> My conclusion is that we have very few 'leaf categories' -- even
> fewer than even I suspected.  They are the following:
> 
>   all languages (*except* japanese)
>   astro
>   benchmarks
>   biology
>   finance
>   mbone
>   picobsd
>   x11-themes
> 
> The ones I was surprised to find were *not*:
> 
>   cad (audio, french)
>   dns (mail)
>   irc (x11)
>   japanese (comms, editors, mail, sysutils, www)
>   news (mail)
>   palm (mail)
>   science (french, graphics)
>   shells (many, via bash2 and zsh)
>   x11-clocks (x11, x11-wm)
> 
> In any case:
> 
> If the need for an entire hierarchy to do 'make index' is not sufficiently
> explicit in the handbook(s), it ought to be made so.  If anyone forwards
> me pointers to documentation that says 'it's ok to just load part of the
> ports hierarchy', I'll be glad to write up PRs for them.  (I'll probably
> never get around to it unless someone provides them :-) )

'make index' in general is under-documented, particularly "How do I
figure out why 'make index' is failing".  Historically it was intended
as an internal tool that wasn't expected to be used by end-users,
which has changed as the need to build customized indexes has grown.
It still has very non-obvious failure modes, which generates a lot of
support mail :(

Kris
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