Undocumented ports.conf options

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

	Hello Paul!

On Feb 20, 2007, at 1:32 AM, Paul Guyot wrote:

> Juan,
>
> I am confused. These so-called "options" are undocumented but should  
> not be used by any user because their semantics could change any time.  
> For example, xcodeversion only means how to handle xcode related tools  
> and the most frequent value ("2.1"), as Kevin notes it, only means 2.1  
> or higher, but once we encounter an incompatible version of xcode, we  
> will need to add a new value and update the semantics. We certainly do  
> not want users to override this setting by putting whatever they think  
> this would mean, this "option" is set by MacPorts infrastructure and  
> it's better to keep users away from it. All that, including  
> portverbose, porttrace, etc. were never intended to be options users  
> could configure, they are just a way to express some information  
> through the whole program.
>
> In fact, I do not understand why you found those in your ports.conf  
> file. Mine is based from MP's ports.conf.in which does not mention  
> those "options":
> http://svn.macosforge.org/projects/macports/browser/trunk/base/doc/ 
> ports.conf.in


	Finding out which "options" are up for user interaction (and therefore  
documentable) and which aren't was also one of my explicit goals;  
comments like yours, "stay away from those!", is what I was looking for  
with my mail. I didn't get all of them from a standard ports.conf file,  
I was reading into the bootstrap_options variable that gets initialized  
in dportinit in base/src/darwinports1.0/darwinports.tcl.

	So help me here build the final list. "Options" that are not meant for  
user interaction and therefore should *not* be documented are:

-) xcodeversion
-) xcodebuildcmd
-) porttrace
-) portverbose (why would you keep this one from being user  
customizable?)
-) libpath? (from reading dportinit, it seems to me like this is a  
dangerous one, but you didn't say anything about it)
-) auto_path? (likewise)
-) master_site_local (created by jkh in r5004, reportedly as a  
customizable option meant to "(...) allows portfetch.tcl to go first to  
a local distfiles cache, if available, before going out over the net to  
try and get it by less efficient means.", but reading  
base/src/darwinports1.0/darwinports.tcl around line 450 and  
base/src/port1.0/portfetch.tcl around line 190 doesn't tell me much  
what the option does and how I could document it)

	Thanks for your help! Regards,...


-jmpp