gtetlow has been so kind to add the ports infrastructure files to the import from the FreeBSD cvs repository to a vendor branch perforce. The files under ports/ include CHANGES, KNOBS, LEGAL, MOVED, Makefile, Mk/, Templates/, Tools/ and UPDATING. This gives people wanting to do development on the ports infrastructure and scripts a real RCS before things are added to cvs. In general, before patches are committed to the ports infrastructure they are thoroughly tested by a build of all ports on the pointyhat cluster. Perforce give people the possiblity to keep patches in a RCS before they are ready for a pointyhat test run. I already started my own branch.

After several months on my TODO-list, I finally pulled myself together and rewrote some of the ideas for the ports infrastructure in a bit more readable english, instead “only I need to read and understand this”, and SGMLify it for the webpage with some help from joel@. See the result here.

Nothing better than to take some of my own medicine, so I started working on one of the items on the list immediately. The use of USE_* and WITH(OUT)_* is quite a mess throughout the tree and could do with a bit of a cleanup. USE_* macros can only be defined internally to the ports infrastructure, not by ports themselves where WITH_* should be used. Looking through the tree, I found several cases of misspelling, which were easy to fix (USE_GNAKE, PREFIY, etc.) There were also a number of cases where macros were called that never existed (USE_PERL=USE_PERL5(_BUILD|_RUN), USE_GZIP) and some experimental macros that never made it into the tree (USE_GPG). The list of suspicious entries already is a lot lower than when I started, and next in line will be fixing the abuse of WITH_* in the ports themselves.