Undocumented ports.conf options

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

On Feb 20, 2007, at 4:07 AM, Paul Guyot wrote:

>>
>> -) xcodeversion
>> -) xcodebuildcmd
>> -) porttrace
>> -) portverbose (why would you keep this one from being user 
>> customizable?)
>
> Please do not touch those.


	Agreed on all counts but one. Why should we want to keep users from 
turning verbose mode on by default? If anything, I think that setting 
would help us, cutting down time spent on the initial stages of support 
("did you remember to pass the -v flag to port(1)?"). Now, I'm not 
saying we ship ports.conf.in with the option turned on out of the box, 
only that we can advertise its existence if needed and therefore we 
should documented.

	All that said, of course, thinking I'm understanding its purpose 
correctly... am I? Does that option also do something else (that we 
don't want users messing with) that I'm missing? In a nutshell, why do 
you feel we should hide it along with the others?

>
>> -) libpath? (from reading dportinit, it seems to me like this is a 
>> dangerous one, but you didn't say anything about it)
>
> libpath is simply ${prefix}/share/darwinports/Tcl/
> This one could be documented, but I have yet to understand the 
> interest of changing the default value.


	I not only see no interest in changing it but also some danger in 
doing so, ${prefix}/share/darwinports/Tcl/ being where MP installs an 
important part of its runtime tcl files and libraries (but I could, of 
course, be mistaken again...). But in any case we agree on this one, 
steer clear from it ;-) I just wanted to make sure about it.

>
>> -) auto_path? (likewise)
>
> auto_path is a standard Tcl variable, documented in library(n). MP 
> code just plays with it, in particular to append libpath to it.


	Hands off it!

>
>> -) 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)
>
> This one works like the MASTER_SITE_LOCAL environment variable, and in 
> fact is set to this value during runtime. The value is appended to the 
> list of mirrors before doing a fetch.

	Appended or prepended? Jordan's comments in r5004 and "set 
master_sites [concat $env(MASTER_SITE_LOCAL) $master_sites]" in 
portfetch.tcl would lead me to understand the latter. But in any 
case,....

> Jordan might have used this feature at some point, it corresponds to 
> very specific scenarios where you deploy MacPorts on several machines 
> and you host the distfiles somewhere on your local network, for 
> example by sharing a flat version of 
> /opt/local/var/db/dports/distfiles/.
> I am wondering if anyone (except maybe Jordan) is using that today and 
> might be interested in using it. It still means having a good idea of 
> what is going on in the fetch phase and how to flatten the distributed 
> files. The behavior could be broken with some rewrite of the fetch 
> code that would help us having mirrors, and I would personally not 
> care about maintaining this feature. In a nutshell, I would not 
> document it.


	Agreed. Personally I don't see much added value in documenting it if 
it's not something that will work by simply assigning a value to the 
key in ports.conf. Something more complex and that requires tweaking 
elsewhere (where users will regularly *not* look) will be immediately 
deemed as broken, thus generating unnecessary support requests. Hands 
off it!

>
> Paul
>


-jmpp