There is no way to know what port options mean (in general)

[Pav Lucistnik]

On Wed, 26 Mar 2008 09:36:11 -0400, Wesley Shields wrote

> While, it has to go somewhere and as a maintainer I have no problem
> printing out a description of each option inside a custom target.
> What's important is that there be some consistency in what that 
> target is called.  Even better would be to provide a framework to 
> ease the work maintainers have to do.  I envision the following:
> 
> - For each available option have a variable called DESC_$FOO which 
> is a 	string which describes that option in detail. - Whatever that 
> target is called should be in bsd.ports.mk and output 	the contents 
> of DESC_$FOO.

I think best it would be to extend the OPTIONS syntax from five to six fields,
adding a long description field. Two issues

1) what about backward compatibility with existing ports

2) is dialog(1) able to display such a text field?

--
Pav Lucistnik <pav at oook.cz>
              <pav at FreeBSD.org>