[wplug-bsd] some basic freebsd hints please

[Duncan Hutty]

Here are some initial questions I can't see covered in [Tom's] lovely 
beastie handbook. Bear in mind that I am coming from a ./configure <lots 
of custom options>, make && make install background of software 
installation; most of my *nix usage is server only, although this is 
changing at ECE.

On my lovely new(!) Ultra5, one of the first things I installed was 
bash. I used a package. And it was Good.
Eager and encouraged, I thought I would try vim from a port, just for 
practice before I started on some of the important stuff like 
postfix/apache, that are this box's real purpose.

#cd /usr/ports/editors/vim
#make

And it was Not Good. I'm not sure how not good it was, because it's 
still going, but I noticed it making a new version of perl, which I 
thought was slightly surprising since I had 5.8.5 already, and I saw 
connections to gnome ftp sites for gtk and references to x11, which was 
more surprising since this is a headless box that's not supposed to have 
the x window system anywhere near it.

So clearly I should have done something equivalent to my familiar 
./configure before making. I would have done a ./configure --help first 
to verify what I could fiddle with (read: remove support for, since this 
box is elderly and presumably is not desperately snappy *and* is low on 
memory). But there was no configure script in the port directory. Should 
I have looked elsewhere for one? Should I have modified the Makefile 
manually? What is the blessed method?

If I do a make deinstall to remove the offending, overlarge vim, will it 
remove all the other crap that it pulled in as dependencies? Is there 
somewhere the activities are recorded so I can manually remove each one?

Feel free to tell me that all this is covered in the Handbook if it is, 
and I shall feel foolish but read it thoroughly before bothering you 
again, instead of looking over the whole and only reading sections that 
appeared to be relevant.

Thanks,
Duncan Hutty