The OpenBSD ports tree comes with 1000s of packages in source form, and allows each port to be compiled and installed by executing “make install” in the application port directory (e.g., /usr/ports/net/mtr ) . Since individual ports can be built different ways, OpenBSD provides different “FLAVORS” to control the package build process. To view the FLAVORS offered by a specific port, the make utility can be invoked with the ‘show’ option:
$ cd xmms
$ make show=FLAVORS
no_esd no_vorbis no_mikmod no_mp3
To build a package with a specific FLAVOR, the FLAVOR environment variable can be set prior to building the package:
$ export FLAVOR="no_esd"
$ make install
Now if they only offered 21 flavors of ice cream (as my friend Clay once said)!