More specifically, the rules are as follows: - when you call pkg_add with a set of pkgnames, those are marked as manual installs. This happens when you do things directly, or through the ports tree. - pkg_add has a -a flag which is used internally within the ports tree, so that dependency installation works.
There currently is no mechanism to override this within the ports tree, which means that, if you run a make update, that update is going to set manual-installation. The more I think about it, the more I think it's indeed a small bug.
