ports requiring OpenSSL not honouring OpenSSL from ports

[Michael Grimm]

On 01.05.2014, at 18:12, Uwe Doering <gemini at geminix.org> wrote:

> One additional data point: "WITH_OPENSSL_PORT" is mentioned in the
> FreeBSD Porter's Handbook:
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/makefile-options.html#idp67984816

If I would have searched for "knobs" in that document (http://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/KNOBS?view=markup), recently, I would have ended with:

| Unknown location: /head/KNOBS

And, I didn't know what "knobs" were until a year ago after migrating from portmaster to poudriere, although running FBSD beginning with 6.2. But don't get me wrong, I do not complain at all, its been my fault, period.

> But then, it cannot be expected that mere _users_ of the ports tree read
> the Porter's Handbook.

True.

> And it is also not mentioned there that it is, to
> my knowledge, considered good practice to have that setting in
> "/etc/make.conf" in order to avoid any confusion about which port is
> linked with what version of OpenSSL.

Here's my question: Which knobs are considered good practice? Is it experience, is it gut feeling, religion, ...? I would love to see a documentation covering the pro and cons about every "knob" ... I do not complain, I know, that is hard work and hard to accomplish.

But any links to documents -besides the ones already mentioned- are highly appreciated.

E.g: excuse my ignorance, but should I stay with ...

| www-jail> ldd `which nginx`
| /usr/local/sbin/nginx:
| 	libcrypt.so.5 => /lib/libcrypt.so.5 (0x8008aa000)

..., or would there be an alternative in ports? libgcrypt? or? (All my relevant services are run being compiled from ports, and within jails.)

Thanks, sorry for eventually dumb questions, and regards,
Michael