Upgrading Perl... Somebody just shoot me and put me out of my misery!

[Matthias Andree]

Am 23.11.2013 12:20, schrieb Mark Martinec:
> On Friday 22 November 2013 21:40:07 Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
>> Now, one last little thing...
>>
>> The note in the UPDATING file dated 20131120 gives essentially the same
>> instructions as the one dated 20131023, *however* it also contains this:
>>
>>    1) Change the option in lang/perl5.16:
>>         make -C /usr/ports/lang/perl5.16 config
>>
>> HUH??  I don't understand this at all.  What exactly is "the option" that
>> we are changing here?  And what does it matter to anything?
>>
>> It would be Nice if this were entierly less opaque.
> 
> $ man ports
> [...]
>      config     Configure OPTIONS for this port using dialog4ports(1).
> 
>> And what does it matter to anything?
> 
> Gives you a choice to re-think your existing/chosen port options.
> For example, a new default is now THREADS, but you may not like
> it, as it somewhat increases the memory usage and requires
> to rebuild all perl modules.

Which shows an interesting facet of this whole tedious process:

We're doing a lousy job of explaining the options to unsavvy users, and
we're also doing a lousy job of tracking options.  Perhaps we should
just slash down the options and go more for "build the default" - it
also reduces testing complexity and would give for a more uniform ports
experience for everyone (packages use default options anyways).

I would even go that far to propose killing some common options such as
NLS DOCS EXAMPLES and replace them by a "make globcalconfig" that sets
them system-wide through make.conf, so that we don't need to set/reset
them each and every time a port changes options, nor even offer them.