[weland]

Do you know of a non-broken way to build ports with many dependencies? This has always been my biggest annoyance and one of the things that constantly made me pick the cough other BSD. Whenever something that I need isn't in the package set, all hell breaks loose: most ports seem to have most options turned on by default (generating a lot of dependencies) and there seems to be no easy way to select configuration options prior to starting the whole build process -- so I end up having to sit for the next two hours, pampering the build process and tuning (actually, mostly disabling) options every time it moves on to the next port. Needless to say, this isn't fun, especially since there's no easy way to tell what dependencies an option is going to pull (I remember being able to retrieve that information through a script I cobbled up but...).

I could probably script it to just go ahead with the default dependencies, but that gives terrible results (I try to install this little console tool and now it's pulling gnome-something-something because the console tool can be integrated with ImageMagick and that's compiled with support for this-weird-format which is provided by this-weird-lib which is part of the Gnome project and now I'm slowly compiling half the packages in Gnome even though I don't use a single program from the Gnome project).

[Freaky]

Add OPTIONS_UNSET=gnome to /etc/make.conf, plus whatever other options you want excluded system-wide. Ditto OPTIONS_SET. You can override for specific ports with ${PORTNAME}_SET/_UNSET too.

[weland]

Ha! Yes, this would make it a lot easier, since I often end up disabling the same things anyway. Thank you!

[xenophonf]

When I have to do it manually, I usually build ports with -DBATCH=yes because I trust the defaults. The config-recursive target is a good one to know, but if I have to tweak package build settings, nowadays I'll set the appropriate OptionsNG knobs ahead of time in /etc/make.conf.

(I rarely install directly from ports, though. Instead, I use Poudriere to make my own package repository, and I have a version of make.conf set up for Poudriere that includes all of my package configuration tweaks.)

[rvanlaar]

You could run:

make config-recursive

a couple of times to do the configuration up front.

See also: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/ports-using.html

[weland]

It's what I usually do, but it's still annoying as hell when more than a dozen packages are involved in the build chain :(.