On Sat, Mar 18, 2006 at 11:33:26AM -0500, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> * I'm by no means certain that I'm handling the teTeX dependency
> properly. You'll note the commented-out BUILDLINK_DEPMETHOD -- I don't
> *think* it should be there, but I'm not certain.  I'm also uncertain
> about accepting teTeX1 and teTeX2; I don't have them installed, so I
> can't easily test.

Include mk/tex.buildlink3.mk. See the top of that file for some
variables you can set. You probably want to set TEX_DEPMETHOD
to build.

> * pkglint complains about MASTER_SITE_CTAN not being defined.  Surely
> that's a bug in pkglint, since it retrieves the tarball just fine.

It really is not defined. I guess you were lucky and the fetch step
found it on the FreeBSD distfile site.
Did you find MASTER_SITE_CTAN documented somewhere or why did you
think you could use it?

> * There are a few subdirectories of BibTool that I'm not certain how to
> handle: regex, Tcl, Perl, and BibTcl.  Regex is just that, which we have
> the base system; do all other pkgsrc platforms?  Should I delete all
> mention of it from the package?

IIRC, Irix doesn't have regex.
What is in the subdirectories?

> * Tcl and Perl are sample programs showing how to integrate those with
> BibTool.  My current patch just changes /usr/local/bin to /usr/pkg/bin
> and puts them in /usr/pkg/share/examples/BibTool.

You're hardcoding "/usr/pkg", that's wrong.
Take a look at section 16.5.5 of the pkgsrc guide,
"Packages with hardcoded paths to other interpreters"
on how to do this properly.
For perl, there is even a special REPLACE_PERL variable.

> * BibTcl is a "pre-alpha" program.  I change the configure script to
> change /usr/local to /usr/pkg for the default prefix, but I don't
> install it anywhere or even compile it.  Should I?  And if so, what's
> the best way to do the recursive configure from the main directory?

You can set CONFIGURE_DIRS to the directories in which you want
to run configure.
It's up to you to decide if you want to install it -- try it out, and
if it's doing something useful, you might as well install it. If not,
just don't, we can always add it later.

> * The documentation is in the form of .dvi files, which I just copy
> to /usr/pkg/share/doc/BiBTools.  Should I convert them to .ps?  Or
> leave them out entirely, in which case there's no need for a dependency
> on teTeX?

If the files are pregenerated, there is no need for a TeX dependency.
Installing them as .dvi is fine. Don't add a dependency on a dvi
viewer, the user can install it manually if he really wants to read
them.

Cheers,
 Thomas