packaging system

[Chris Pressey]

On Fri, 31 Oct 2003 14:23:53 -0500
Richard Coleman <richardcoleman at xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I don't think anyone is suggesting to remove such capabilities.  Just 
> give some structure (or at least style guidelines) to the method of 
> creating these.  This is already happening (slowly) in FreeBSD. 
> Portlint was just enhanced to complain if the port maintainer uses 
> variables in the USE_* namespace.

Yes, that's all I meant - that the namespace be better standardized.
Call all user knobs <portname>_WITH_<option>, or something like that.
Maybe <portgroup>_WITH_<option>, pending definition of a "port group"
(GNOME or KDE make some sense, other groupings might be a bit muddy.)

On the topic of standardizing things, it would be extra-nice, but
probably extra-difficult, to standardize the cached configure
information.  I have no idea how much time is wasted just having
seemingly every single port independently discover the maximum length of
command-line arguments.  Surely there's a way to reduce it?

-Chris