interactive ports - the plague

[RW]

On Mon, 03 Mar 2008 10:24:21 +0100
Dominic Fandrey <kamikaze at bsdforen.de> wrote:

> I don't mind ports that use the config framework. You can deal with
> them without trouble by setting BATCH, using portmaster or
> portconfig-recursive from bsdadminscripts.
> 
> But I find ports like ghostscript-gpl that open an ncurses dialogue
> between configure and build stage very annoying. They are the reason
> one wakes up in the morning and finds out that instead of having
> finished all updates, the machine hasn't even started updating,
> because it's just hanging there, waiting with a config dialogue that
> doesn't even remember what I choose last time.
> 
> I cannot find any policy on interactive ports in the Porters'
> Handbook. Maybe there aught to be one.

Setting BATCH is supposed to prevent genuinely interactive ports from
building (that's actually the original purpose of BATCH).

In my experience ghostscript-gpl will build with default options if
you set  BATCH, or are you saying that you need a specific non-default
option?