I've just committed a new target: dump-vars This adds some introspection capabilities to the ports tree, instead of adding more and more fields to the describe target.
This target dumps a big set of ports variables to stdout, so that further tools can use it for basically anything. I've also committed an instance of such a tool: infrastructure/package/mksqlitedb This takes the output of dump-vars, parses a few details, and builds an sqlite database out of it, with a main Ports table, and a few dependent tables for stuff which is reasonably easy to parse (e.g., Dependencies, Libraries, etc) Using, for instance, sqlitebrowser, one can then answer stupid questions, such as, how many ports depend on the z library. Or how many ports use perl as a CONFIGURE_STYLE and are actually arch-independent ? With this database, and HTML::Mason, it should be trivial to build a web interface that presents any kind of information about the ports tree.
