In D32098#726166, @bapt wrote:

It does buidl fine the 2 ports (notcurses included) which are marked as USES=ncurses:port I checked

I don't know the base make stuff well enough to comment on it, but if devel/notcurses builds without ports ncurses with this change then it should be fine.

In D31437#710938, @cperciva wrote:

I'm ok with this going into 14.0 as long as there's no intention to MFC; however, I think as a "deprecation path" we should probably consider putting portsnap back into the ports tree (as we've done many times in the past when code is removed from base), at least temporarily.

This is just a first pass.