port notes

[Scott Haneda]

I briefly asked about "notes" in Portfiles a while back, and figured that since I am working on a port edit now, I may as well move the relevant ui_msg's to notes.

Can "note" only be called once per Portfile?

    notes "this is a test"
    port notes
      pure-ftpd has the following notes:
      this is a test
    
    notes "this is a test"
    notes "this is a second test"
    port notes
      pure-ftpd has the following notes:
      this is a second test
    
    notes "this is a multiline test
    with this being the second line"
    notes "a second notes block"
    port notes
      pure-ftpd has the following notes:
      a second notes block

When are notes printed out, only on user instantiation of the `port notes <portname>` command, or do they get printed on `port install <portname>` as well?  I am trying to determine which of my data needs to remain as ui_msg and which can go to notes.

Right now, in the pure-ftpd port, I have an entire post-activate phase that is all ui_msg, which I believe could be entirely changed to notes.  Should I do a conditional check to make sure the port is installed, or is that taken care of by MacPorts internals?

For example, I now have:
    ui_msg "You can start ${pretty_name} from the command line with:"
    ui_msg "    sudo ${prefix}/sbin/${name} &"

That would not make a lot of sense to display via `port notes` if the software is not installed.  So I should wrap those blocks in a condition that checks if the port was installed?  What is the best way to check if a port is installed?  I was going to do a file exists check on the binary, but there probably is a better way to actually look in the MacPorts registry maybe.

Though I am not sure how possible that is going to be, if I am only allowed one call to "notes" per Portfile.

Any comments, suggestions, or links to new docs I am overlooking would be appreciated.  Thank you.
-- 
Scott * If you contact me off list replace talklists@ with scott@ *