On Fri, 16 Jul 1999 Havard.Eidnes@runit.sintef.no wrote:

>  - Some of the targets used in source installs are a little
>    deviant from the normal behaviour.  E.g. "make install" does
>    not always install, "make deinstall" does not always deinstall
>    the program (it rather usually tells you to manually do
>    pkg_delete -- why can't make do that instead?)

"make deinstall" won't delete on older version of the package; maybe
it should.

>  - pkg_info.  Hm.  There's no easy way that I've found to get
>    complete information dumped about a package without having to
>    know the exact version installed.

"pkg_info -RrBb foo\*" gives lots of info about whatever version of
package "foo" that happens to be installed. (You just have to escape
the "*" for your shell.)

>    (What triggered this was the recent introduction of the
>    checksums file for the patches.)

For the patch-sums, the only extra step needed is "make makepatchsum".

I'm basically in the same boat you are, a user/contributor. I too find
the documentation somewhat difficult to absorb. I end up using "make
-V variable" a lot, but I prefer grep'ing through the *.pkg.mk files
over "make -d". Hope that helps.