This displays some of my ideas for providing a standard interface for ports to gain useful information from a user when building a port, instead of expecting the user to read the ports Makefile. [ source ]
A new example "client" program is gportconf, which now takes an XML file which is even more easily constructable, and readable and maintainable, and displays a nice GUI gtk screen which allows the user to choose one of the predefined classes, and also modify the individual options. [ screenshot ]
An example "client" program is pdlg, which displays a dialog screen asking the user to select which options they want to enable/disable. [ screenshot ]
It has support for default configurations that can be effected using a class system (possibly a set of minimal, maximal, secure and normal installations for each port, if appropriate), and option dependencies. It also allows for batch operation, without the display of the user query.
There is only one real patch, which isn't complete, that adds a "portconf" target to ports, which is called directly before do-fetch. This may be a problem if one has to deal with FETCH_DEPENDS added during the port configuration progress, but I don't anticipate any problems. Theoretically a port maintainer can generate something required in the port configuration process in pre-fetch. This patch is also out of date.
