On Wed, Aug 01, 2007 at 01:25:02AM +0000, Roland Illig wrote:
>  1. The package does not use the options framework at all. In this case, 
>  I would not be surprised about the warnings.

It is obvious that the package give in the example uses the options framework.

>  2. The package uses the options framework, is already installed and has 
>  no options selected. In this case, pkg_info prints an empty line, which 
>  is not treated as "empty output" by make (at least for NetBSD 3.0 and 
>  current pkgsrc).

The package in the example (libgnomeui) is indeed installed on the system
as an automatic dependency with no options selected.

pkg_info does *not* print an empty line in that case.  It prints nothing:

nervous-energy!bad 162 % pkg_info -Q PKG_OPTIONS libgnomeui | od -x
nervous-energy!bad 163 % 

>  3. The package uses the options framework and is not yet installed. In 
>  this case, the show-var target is used which also prints an empty line.

ISTR that I tested it under these conditions too and I saw the same error.
However, I can't reproduce it now.

Here is how to reproduce the behaviour with a makefile:

nervous-energy!bad 167 % cat zorch
FOO != true 2> /dev/null

all:
nervous-energy!bad 168 % make -f zorch
make: "/tmp/zorch" line 1: warning: Couldn't read shell's output for "true 2> /dev/null"
nervous-energy!bad 169 % 

--chris