--pretend & --fetch-all options

[mel]

> I love computers for that they do the stupid stuff for
> me better than I could do myself. Of course, I under-
> stand that I should not update portfiles between
> fetching and building, but I am almost sure that I
> would not get it right to prefetch sources manually
> for lets say tomcat5. As far as I understand, you are
> not done when asking "port deps tomcat5" and copying
> the dependencies list. I bet I would forget to get me
> the sources of e.g. jakarta-bcel which is not listed
> for tomcat5 but which is used by mx4j that in turn is
> a dependency of tomcat5. Probably my build would fail
> shortly because of such a stupid thing that I might
> have overseen, just because I am human. And it is
> tedious, to check this manually.

IMHO, the pre-fetch will works OK if the deps are
correctly 'calculated'. Also, prefetch does not work
i.e. die if certain packages (nessus, metasploit, etc)
requires registrations.


> That said, it still remains second to the first idea
> of mel who started this thread, to implement a dry
> run feature. Maybe, dry run would just be half of
> the implementation of prefetch.

Due to the reason above, I'd prefer the the dry run feature
to be implemented first, because I think in the long run
it will help to improve port's variants feature.

--mel