RFE: man page / Documentation

[christian.unger@…]

please provide more information on configure, esp. if it is possible to reconfigure an already downloaded port as necessary, e.g. if the portfile configuration doesn't provide enough variants

from the man page:

configure

Runs any configure process for portname.

from documentation on ​http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/:

Now that the sources have been extracted into a work directory in the Portfile directory, we can configure the sources to compile with the desired options. By default DarwinPorts assumes the software you're porting uses an autoconf configure script and will pass the --prefix=${prefix} argument to configure, specifying that the software should be installed in the directory tree used by DarwinPorts.

ircII's standard set of options is fine for a base install on Darwin, so we won't add anything to the configure phase and instead just move on to the build phase. Please look at the later chapters in this Guide for more information about the Configuration phase.

[jmpp@…]

It's not clear to me what type of clarifications you're looking for: from the perspective of a user who is not seeing enough functionality provided by the Portfile, or from the perspective of a Portfile writer who's not too sure on how to proceed in the process of, namely, writing his Portfile once he's advanced beyond the configuration stage but wishes to change a thing or two.

I ask because each perspective warrants completely different documentation approaches: in the former we should instruct users to file enhacement tickets against the skinny ports, but for the latter we should expand our man pages (portfile.7 comes to mind) and the as of yet unwritten (or unresurrected, if we can ever use the OpenDarwin based one) Portfile writing guide.

-jmpp