Suggested improvements for ports

[Frank J. Laszlo]

Doug Barton wrote:
> Dominic Fandrey wrote:
>> Paul Schmehl wrote:
>>> 1) You can't build a dependent port and first set the config for the
>>> options that you want.  So, when you select sasl in postfix, you never
>>> get the chance to check the saslauthd option, for example.
>>
>> As the ports man page states:
>>
>> # make config-recursive
>>
>> does what you want. It's surprising how often people claim this 
>> feature is
>> missing, even though it has been there ever since I started using 
>> FreeBSD.
>
> And it's surprising how often people don't listen when I explain that 
> config-recursive is not a complete solution. :) It builds the list 
> first, so that if you enable an option that creates a dependency on 
> another port it will be missed. Portmaster does not have that 
> limitation because it runs 'make config' before doing the dependency 
> check for each port.
>
> Doug
>

As a workaround, you can run 'make config-recursive' multiple times 
until it will no longer pull up config dialogs. This will catch those 
extra dependencies created by checking options during the process.

-Frank