PortGroup directory hierarchy/priority

[Mojca Miklavec]

I just wanted to say that I also often experience very strange
problems after modifications to any of the PortGroups (of course I do
modifications in the local repository rather than the global one that
gets synced via rsync as I don't want them to be overwritten).

Most often I was getting errors saying that a required variable (which
I just added to the PortGroup) was not defined. I have two local
repositories (I usually work with a single one, so locality of the
PortGroup would not necessarily explain the problems), but a bunch of
symlinks pointing to folders with Portfiles located elsewhere. As soon
as I committed the change and got the new file via the official
repository, the problem was gone.

Next time when I hit a problem I'll try to investigate in the spirit
of tree where the PortGroup lives.

The annoying part of that "locality" is that I'm not easily able to
test changes in a PortGroup that would affect a large number of ports
without actually copying the complete tree over. (Let's say that I
would want to test what happens if I switch to out-of-sounce CMake
builds by default. From what I understand I would then have to copy
all ports using CMake to the same tree.)

But I understand that there are cases where developers would want a
different kind of behaviour.

Mojca