Sigh... why do you guys always have to invent new terminology, and point
out you didn't use our code ?  

I thought the war was mostly over.

Two or three points:

- DESTDIR is normally used for this kind of stunt. There's more to FAKE
than meet the eyes. In reality, recent GNU stuff, for instance, heeds
DESTDIR. Which is why the PREFIX='$${STAGE_PREFIX}${PREFIX}' is only used
for ports that need it.  In theory, imake stuff knows about DESTDIR as well. 
A few broken Imakefile leave a space in the wrong position, and need fixing
there.  Consider using DESTDIR. In many cases where it's supported,
configuring using PREFIX='$${STAGE_PREFIX}${PREFIX}' does not work.
For instance, teTeX needs some further magic, because it evals its prefix
in such a way that this just doesn't work.

- most Makefile.in that heed DESTDIR actually have
DESTDIR=
in the Makefile.in.

That's so that you can (should) override DESTDIR in flags you pass to
make during install. That's the purpose of FAKE_FLAGS in OpenBSD.
Some AFS stuff uses similar conventions (INSTALL_TOP instead of DESTDIR
if memory serves).

- if I trust your cvs, you still haven't changed your make to pass
variables set on the command line to submakes through MAKEFLAGS.
It's your choice, but you're making it extra tough for handling stage
installs. Especially since passing MAKEFLAGS to submakes is a POSIX
feature, so whatever tweaks you will need to do to get fake installs to
work with recursive makefiles WON'T be taken back by software authors.
The code is trivial. You probably have a few tweaks to make throughout your
source tree to make it work, but believe me, it's worth it.

- completely dynamic packing-lists may not be such a good idea. It has been
technically feasible in OpenBSD as well ever since we got fake, and we
haven't used it. Why ?  well, it's good being able to compute the actual 
packing-lists without having to build the whole package. Stuff like package
conflicts come to mind... 

As you said, updating packing-lists is a large part of the chore of
updating packages, but there ARE good reasons for that. It is incredibly
easy to miss problems with automatic packing-lists. Problems that become
glaringly obvious when you check what changes.


As far as faking stuff goes, we have less than 20 ports left unfaked in the
OpenBSD tree... and they've mostly been left that way because they're not
that useful.