In D26667#601994, @0mp wrote:

It's probably better to keep those binaries not stripped for debugging. Instead, it might be better to document that they are not stripped on purpose.

Ah, that’s a good point about the distinction!

I know it’s late now because it’s already been committed, but I think this should be renamed to @empty. @rmdir was renamed to @dir because plists most logically express the contents, not what to do when they’re deleted.

Much as I’d enjoy it, pkg is the main but not the only installation mechanism. Preventing those users from shooting themselves in the foot is important—and the users who use ports/portmaster are often those who find anything else “too difficult.” Is there perhaps a way to simplify the maintenance burden? Alex makes a good-sounding argument about separating ZTS builds, but do debug builds really need a separate destination too?

Makes sense. Note that this will necessarily break on ports that rely on no backup files being created. There are a number that patch files that get installed with ${COPYTREE_*}.

Does -i... need to be stripped from REINPLACE_ARGS? Like ${REINPLACE_ARGS:N-i*} or something?

I really like the idea of being able to simply and cleanly set vars for specific ports from /etc/make.conf. I think the choice of variable naming is exactly right here, and the implementation is clean and simple.