variables and external commands in portfiles - was ${perl5.lib}

[Mark Duling]

"Daniel J. Luke" <dluke at geeklair.net> on Sunday, January 28, 2007 at 11:46
AM -0800 wrote:
>> Is there a way to get the results of an external command into a  
>> variable
>> in a portfile?
>
>Yep.
>
>Take a look at PYTHON_PATH in the subversion-pythonbindings port for  
>one way to do this sort of thing.

Ok, will do.  Thanks.
>
>> It seems that the freebsd ports sytem has access for perl variables  
>> even
>> for non-perl ports.  Would that be easy to hack onto MaPorts?  It  
>> would be
>> nice but I don't know the pros and cons.
>
>I don't think it's worthwhile to add it to base/ since it's  
>relatively easy for the portfiles get their own information if they  
>need it.

Perhaps there is another option, which did not occur to me until now.  I
put smokeping (the app for which I'd like to use ${sitearch}) in the net
category, but really I suppose there is no reason why I couldn't
categorize it as perl and net categories and just use the perl5 portgroup,
then I'd have access to {sitearch}.  It is a perl application, though it
requires no compiling at all and is used to monitor networks.  Is this
valid reasoning?  If so ...

Could I just add "PortGroup   perl5 1.0" to my portfile?  If so should it
be in dports/perl or is adding "perl" as a virtual  or secondary category
sufficient to use the perl5 portgroup?

Mark