Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
An up-to-date macports.conf provides a good overview over all options and contains short documentation lines. [ ... ] 1) Add macports.conf.dist
Yes, at a minimum, you need an updated reference config file available at all times, though I dislike the .dist approach. If it's just a passive reference, then you need to either write a merge utility (like FreeBSD's "mergemaster") or dump the entire problem of merging in the user's lap, neither solution bringing much happiness.
Ok, the file would not necessarily be called like this. It could also go into share/doc/macports or anywhere else. And yes, the merging is the big disadvantage of this approach.
A better approach is FreeBSD's /etc/defaults - a set of shadow files you keep up to date, making the primary configuration file an override. You can still get stale data lingering in the user configuration file, keeping an option on or off when the default has changed, but sometimes that's a feature.
This is, in any case, how I'd handle this one. Always install a macports.conf.default and add some logic to load the two in order (macports.conf should, in fact, be optional).
This sounds like a good solution. Although it does not make the documentation lines visible to the user. Rainer