Re: Preferences, how to specify

[Roland Illig <roland.illig%gmx.de@localhost>]

Am 03.09.2019 um 16:09 schrieb Ottavio Caruso:
> Anyway, there are tons of variables, targets and what not that are not
> documented in "make help topic=".  It's in my todo list to make a post
> about this either here or on tech-pkg.

It's pretty simple to make these variables searchable by "make help".
Just add enough documentation in the header of the file (3 lines are
enough, see mk/help/help.awk, function end_of_topic).

Each file should have a section "User-settable variables" and
"Package-settable variables", listing all important variables. These are
then found by "make help".

In addition, each file should have a _VARGROUPS section, which helps to
see what really happens under the hood. For example, mk/subst.mk adds
the identifier "subst" to _VARGROUPS, and this generates a make target
"show-all-subst" showing all variable definitions that are relevant to
that topic. Especially for large topics like "tools" or "bl3", or for
standard ones like "fetch", "configure" or "build", this gives further
hints at what can be configured by the pkgsrc user or by the package.
More details can be found in the second half of mk/misc/show.mk.

Roland