Options name, descriptions and consistency

[Baptiste Daroussin]

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 05:40:08PM -0600, Warren Block wrote:
> On Wed, 30 May 2012, Alberto Villa wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 8:33 AM, Baptiste Daroussin <bapt at freebsd.org> wrote:
> >> On of the reasons of bsd.options.desc.mk is to be able to share common options
> >> and descriptions, to have better consistency between ports and to have general
> >> meaning descriptions that make more sense, has anyone can improve the
> >> description of an option.
> >
> > While I really like what bsd.options.desc.mk is supposed to do, I
> > would like to recommend to any committer/maintainer (and I will
> > personally submit a patch for the soon-to-come documentation and for
> > the file itself) to think before always relying on on default option
> > descriptions.
> >
> > Sometimes just saying "Enable XXX support" doesn't mean anything to
> > the user, and a more explanatory text would be far better, explaining
> > maybe what feature one is about to enable instead of just what he is
> > going to depend on.
> 
> Deja vu:
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/makefile-options.html#AEN2598
> 
> Look at the second tip.  That's brand new, added because users were 
> complaining in the forums recently.  (And before, but recently got my 
> attention.)


Thank you!!

> 
> > So, please, do not hesitate to redefine option descriptions for your
> > ports if you feel you can add more information for the port specific
> > case.
> 
> Some of the entries in the KNOBS file could use better descriptions 
> also.


Let's focus on bsd.options.desc.mk descriptions improvements as the KNOBS file
will die $soon :) ($soon being undefined yet :)

regards,
Bapt
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