[77pt77]

I think this is very common.

There's a bunch of boilerplate code that just gets carried from project to project.

My favourite was when KDE decided to move to cmake. People realized that most m4/autoconf macros were there for no reason and no one actually knew what they checked for let alone how.

[revelation]

You might like this essay:

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257

[77pt77]

> Sam Leffler's graphics/libtiff is one of the 122 packages on the road to www/firefox, yet the resulting Firefox browser does not render TIFF images

Don't even get me started on the circular dependencies that need to be broken by installing packages with some options disabled. Kind of an awkward bootstrap.

[rleigh]

I added CMake support to libtiff last year. Haven't checked if the ports tree uses it yet.