General usefulness of option descriptions

[Ulrich Spörlein]

On Sun, 2012-10-07 at 15:24:28 +0200, Michael Gmelin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> This probably has been discussed before, but I think in many cases
> using the default descriptions of OptionsNG is more harm than good.
> 
> I converted security/libpreludedb to OptionsNG yesterday and
> left in most of the descriptions and therefore overrode them. I did
> that for a good reason, since I believe that the description of the
> option should be more than just repeating the option name.
> Unfortunately the portmgr in charge disagreed and removed all
> description overrides, figuring that I must have forgotten to remove
> them. That's why I raise this topic on the list - I feel like we're
> using a lot of information if we converting ports like this.
> 
> In this specific example this means:
> 
> Before:
>      PERL=off: Include Perl bindings
>      PYTHON=off: Include Python bindings
>      MYSQL=on: Use MySQL backend
>      PGSQL=off: Use PostgreSQL backend
>      SQLITE=off: Use SQLite backend
> 
> Afterwards:
>      DOCS=on: Build and/or install documentation
>      MYSQL=on: MySQL database
>      PERL=off: Perl scripting language
>      PGSQL=off: PostgreSQL database
>      PYTHON=off: Python bindings
>      SQLITE=off: SQLite database

Just picking on these couple of examples, pretty much all of them are
worse afterwards. Does PERL for this port mean that it adds perl
bindings or perl scripting support? PYTHON wasn't changed.

It really is worse afterwards ...

hth
Uli