The easiest way to look at this bug is to examine the behavior... and to do that, we need an example.  For my example, I'll use the kicad ports --- there's half a dozen of them or so.

Obviously, I noticed things because the kicad ports all have similar sets of dependencies.  With options -C, I'd expect to set each dependant port's options once. When I invoke poudriere options -p HEAD -C -f my-list-of-ports, however, I end up cycling through the same bunch of ports for each kicad port.  It prints out "Options unchanged." each time ... even though I'm setting an option in some of those ports (TEST, in a few cases) ... each time it comes back to that port, the option is unset again (making it frustrating if I miss setting the option the last time it comes around).

Even after running a successful round of poudriere options, and without updating ports, running it again with the same list of ports brings up options dialogues.

... now this also might be something with the ports machinery itself, but I staked the PR here because I didn't know where else to put it.