Hi, I regularly encounter the situation that I need to compile a certain port which has dependencies. These dependencies are often non-obvious, eg. due to the transitivity of the issue (currently I'm seeing it with the PHP5 port). Now, when I go to the port's directory and say "make package", the system goes to fetch and build all missing packages, and all missing packages required by the missing packages, etc.pp (the ports system effectively computes the transitive hull of the dependencies and tries to install them, but from source if they are missing).
I'd very much prefer to be able to set an environment variable, or to specify a different target which would result in the system not building all ports and the rest of the world, but fetch as many binary packages as possible to satisfy dependencies, and only then go to build the few remaining dependencies that are not available in binary form. In the context of the aforementioned PHP port, this would mean eg. that if mysql is required, then the system should just fetch and install it from the PKG_PATH, as opposed to fetching the source for mysql and then all stuff that's required to build the mysql packages. TIA! -- Kind regards, --Toni++
