I ended up committing a slightly different version (which does pkgname-sub directly), since it's easy to check by inspection that nothing changes.
I'm 1/4th of the way through cleaning up existing ports (where a lot of explicit PKGNAME-sub is now unneeded). The documentation part in bsd.port.mk(5) is done as well in a nutshell, assuming DISTNAME = foo-1.0 if you have MULTI_PACKAGES = -main -gtk -server then PKGNAMEs get default values, namely: PKGNAME-main = foo-1.0 (so yeah, -main is slightly special) PKGNAME-gtk = foo-gtk-1.0 PKGNAME-server = foo-server-1.0 apart from ports that have weird correspondences (say a SUBPACKAGE -plugin that yields a -termin name), and of ports with specific naming conventions (prepending py3- to a -python subpackage), a lot of MULTI_PACKAGES ports will no longer require any specific love to set the correct PKGNAMEs. Remember: make show=PKGNAMES will give you the current set of names.
