Some of the software in FreeBSD‘s Ports provide a menu based interface to configure the package. For instance, when you’re trying to install the curl package by typing make in the ports directory, the install has an option to use GNUTLS which you can select.
However if you do this without disabling OpenSSL, the port will fail to compile since these two options are mutually exclusive.
You can try to run ‘make’ again hoping to fix this configuration error. However you will notice that ports is not bringing up the configuration menu anymore. Removing the ‘work’ dir where all the source file related operations (configure, make etc) are performed, you will still not be able to bring the configuration menu up.
That’s because the initial configuration options are kept elsewhere. These files are in /var/db/ports . For instance, you will find a file called “curl” which contains a representation of all the options you’ve previously selected in a way that the Makefile (configure script is more accurate) of the port will understand.
Remove this file and the next time you try to install the same port, you will see the configuration menu again.
In my opinion make should accept a ‘reconfigure’ option that overrides the cache. If it does I didn’t find it.