In my re­dis­cov­ery of FreeBSD I discovered some portmaster settings which help immensely with two competing problems when using the ports system.

1. We need build-de­pen­den­cies installed to build certain ports.

2. We do not want build-de­pen­den­cies installed all the time.

Rebuilding the de­pen­den­cies every time some port needs a particular one stinks, and apparently someone else thought so as well. They came up with a solution I like, but I also know I check the solutions I create too rarely, and included doc­u­men­ta­tion of each option in my version (contents of /usr/local/etc/portmaster.rc below).

# Do not create temporary backup packages before pkg_delete (-B)
NO_BACKUP=Bopt

# Make and save a package of the new port (-g)
MAKE_PACKAGE=gopt

# Always delete stale distfiles without prompting (-d)
ALWAYS_SCRUB_DISTFILES=dopt

# Install a package if available (-P or --packages)
PM_PACKAGES=first

# Delete build-only dependencies when finished (--delete-build-only)
PM_DEL_BUILD_ONLY=pm_dbo

# Specify a local package repository (--local-packagedir)
LOCAL_PACKAGEDIR=/usr/ports/packages

# Only use packages from --local-packagedir (--packages-local)
PM_PACKAGES_LOCAL=pmp_local

# Do not prompt the user for failed backup package creation
PM_IGNORE_FAILED_BACKUP_PACKAGE=pm_ignore_failed_backup_package

That would have been easy to figure out had I actually read the sample file... heh. Guess I will have to build X.Org and awesome to try this out.