Several of the FreeBSD port maintenance tools, such as
portupgrade(1), rely on a database called
/usr/ports/INDEX
which keeps track of
such items as port dependencies. INDEX
is created by the top-level
ports/Makefile
via
make index
, which descends into each port
subdirectory and executes make describe
there. Thus, if make describe
fails in any
port, no one can generate INDEX
, and many
people will quickly become unhappy.
It is important to be able to generate this file no
matter what options are present in
make.conf
, so please avoid doing things
such as using .error
statements when (for
instance) a dependency is not satisfied. (See
Section 12.15, “Avoid Use of the .error
Construct”.)
If make describe
produces a string
rather than an error message, you are probably safe. See
bsd.port.mk
for the meaning of the
string produced.
Also note that running a recent version of
portlint
(as specified in the next section)
will cause make describe
to be run
automatically.
All FreeBSD documents are available for download at http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/
Questions that are not answered by the
documentation may be
sent to <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org>.
Send questions about this document to <freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org>.