Welcome to the OpenBSD ports collection.
For more information on the OpenBSD ports tree please visit
http://www.openbsd.org/ports.html
For general information on the OpenBSD tree please visit
http://www.openbsd.org
======================================================================
This file is mostly obsolete. You should refer to the corresponding
man-pages: ports(7), packages(7), mirroring-ports(7), packages-specs (7),
and bsd.port.mk(5) instead.
======================================================================
Contacts
========
* individual ports have a MAINTAINER.
Go to the port directory and use make show=MAINTAINER to see it.
* ports without explicit maintainers, and other general issues should
go to ports@openbsd.org
Considering the size of the ports tree, and even though we strive to
eradicate all bugs, things may go wrong on individual ports.
In such a case, as a general rule, try to contact the MAINTAINER first.
If nothing happens after a reasonable delay, start plaguing him,
or go to the next step.
Developers with a major investment in the ports tree include
Brad Smith <brad@openbsd.org>, Christian Weisberger <naddy@openbsd.org>,
Marc Espie <espie@openbsd.org>.
Those people can be contacted to put some pressure on a lazy maintainer.
But we do read ports@openbsd.org, so...
The ports tree
==============
The ports tree usually live under /usr/ports. It's a hierarchical
list of recipes to build various pieces of software.
We'll call that PORTSDIR in the following discussion.
Stuff that doesn't constitute a port proper, but rather paraphernalia,
is stored under /usr/ports/infrastructure, INFRA in the following
discussion.
The main Makefile, PORTSDIR/Makefile, can be used to obtain various
information.
* make key=<keyword> describe
will locate ports that match the given keyword in the Index and print
information about them.
* make index
can be used to rebuild that INDEX, normally useful after you update your
ports dir through cvs.
* make readmes
will populate the ports tree with a set of html indices (currently somewhat
broken).
The script INFRA/build/out-of-date will find
discrepancies between your installed packages and the INDEX. This might
give you an hint as to what you would need to rebuild to update a machine.
Some useful `make' trivia
=========================
* if you always use some make variables, e.g., DISTDIR, CLEANDEPENDS, or
MASTER_SITE_OVERRIDE you can put this in your local make configuration
file instead: /etc/mk.conf.
* starting with 2.6, make can deal with case issues, so CLEANDEPENDS=Yes
or CLEANDEPENDS=YES or even CLEANDEPENDS=yEs should be equivalent.
* the make process uses some subroutines out of /usr/share/mk. Starting
with 2.6, the `port' subroutines live in INFRA/mk.
The bsd.port.mk and bsd.port.subdir.mk in /usr/share/mk are only stubs
that redirect to those files.
Building a port
===============
It's usually as simple as
cd category/portname && make && make install
That specific `make' will normally
* resolve dependencies and go out to install required ports recursively
* fetch the software source (`distfiles' and `distribution patches')
from the available media into your repository
* extract the source
* apply distribution patches and OpenBSD patches
* build the program
`make install' will
* install the software in a special playpen directory (the fake area)
* create a binary package out of that fake-install
* install the package on your system
Some ports can have some options (flavors), or demand that you make some choice
before building, e.g.,
cd /usr/ports/editors/vim/stable
env FLAVOR=no_x11 make all install
Some ports may give you some information about ways to build them.
Likewise, installing or uninstalling
a package may give you useful information. READ IT.
You can also use
* `make clean=install' to remove the installed software (calls pkg_delete)
* `make package' to create a binary package without necessarily installing
it. Packages normally end up in /usr/ports/packages/${MACHINE_ARCH},
overridable with PACKAGES.
* `make clean=package' to remove a previously built package.
* `make clean' to remove all scaffolding after the port is built and
installed.
* `make clean=dist' to also remove distfiles and distribution patches
from the repository
* `make clean=depends' will also remove sub ports that have been
recursively built.
* `make clean="depends dist"', guess what this does.
Please note that, in normal use, the OpenBSD ports tree will grow quite
a lot. Starting with OpenBSD 3.0, working directories for packaged ports
can be cleaned out. See the bulk-packages target.
However, the distfiles and built
packages still can take a lot of space (over 1 Gb).
You can redirect ports activity elsewhere by making use of WRKOBJDIR,
DISTDIR and PACKAGES. `find /usr/ports -type d -name w-\* -print'
can be useful to find out ports you forgot to clean out.
Where do the distfiles come from
================================
Retrieving distfiles is a subpart of `make' that can be invoked separately
as `make fetch'.
Starting with 2.6, the fetch process is configurable by editing
INFRA/db/network.conf.
The ports tree does store files it retrieves in a repository area,
normally /usr/ports/distfiles (defined as DISTDIR=${PORTSDIR}/distfiles;
you can override this if you need; e.g., assuming you've got a cdrom
full of distfiles mounted under /cdrom, you can make stuff with
DISTDIR=/cdrom/distfiles, provided all the distfiles are available on
the CD-Rom).
If the file is found in the repository, the build process continues.
In some rare cases, vendors change their archive contents without changing
the archive name, so the file in the repository may end up having a wrong
checksum. Or, if you aborted a network transfer, the file in the repository
may be truncated, and end up having a wrong checksum again. In such a case,
manual intervention is required (it was deemed that such problems may need
human expertise and that blindly removing distfiles was not a good idea).
It's usually as simple as deleting the offending file, or doing a
make distclean.
To avoid building from corrupted archives, the ports tree holds checksums
for almost all files it retrieves from other media (a few ports ignore
checksums from the files listed in IGNOREFILES).
Those are strong cryptographic checksums: sha1, rmd160, and md5,
in that order. See CIPHERS and PREFERRED_CIPHERS in
INFRA/mk/bsd.port.mk for details.
If the directory /cdrom/distfiles exist, available distfiles are copied
off that directory to your repository. You can avoid the copy overhead
by defining FETCH_SYMLINK_DISTFILES. You can give another location for
the distfiles as CDROM_SITE.
OpenBSD `ftp' command is normally used to fetch distfiles off the net,
so all file addresses are given in URL format.
Each port uses its own set of sites, and there should also be backups of
the distribution files on ftp.openbsd.org. MASTER_SITE_BACKUP holds an
overridable list of backup sites, normally
ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/distfiles/${DIST_SUBDIR}/
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/distfiles/${DIST_SUBDIR}/
You can ask the fetch process to try to retrieve files from those sites first
by setting MASTER_SITE_OVERRIDE, e.g.,
make MASTER_SITE_OVERRIDE='${MASTER_SITE_BACKUP}'
You can retrieve file from the OpenBSD site only with
make MASTER_SITE_OPENBSD=Yes
Continuing our CD-Rom example, you could also fetch files off a CD-Rom into
your repository for safe-keeping by using the following incantation:
make fetch MASTER_SITE_OVERRIDE='file:/cdrom/${DIST_SUBDIR}/'
This is equivalent to using CDROM_SITE.
Some common sites have their own variables. It is strongly recommended
that you edit the INFRA/db/network.conf file for
your site.
Please refer to that file for a complete list, and address lists
(those are not exhaustive). Those include:
MASTER_SITE_GNU FSF and other GPL programs
MASTER_SITE_XCONTRIB X11 contributed software
MASTER_SITE_SUNSITE Sunsite site and mirror, major linux archive
MASTER_SITE_GNOME Gnome
MASTER_SITE_PERL_CPAN Comprehensive perl archive network
MASTER_SITE_TEX_CTAN Comprehensive TeX archive network
MASTER_SITE_KDE KDE
MASTER_SITE_TCLTK Tcl/Tk
MASTER_SITE_AFTERSTEP AfterStep
MASTER_SITE_WINDOWMAKER WindowMaker
There is a backup copy of that file in
INFRA/templates/network.conf.template.
In case you don't have a permanent network connection, you should read
mirroring-ports(7).
Building several ports
======================
Each category directory holds a Makefile that propagates commands to
its sub ports, e.g., if you cd /usr/ports/audio && make package, this should
build packages for all ports under /usr/ports/audio.
A more useful command is the
INFRA/package/check-plist script.
You normally prepare a list of the ports you want to build, in the same
format as INFRA/db/essentials, and pass it to that script.
This yields a sorted list of the required ports.
You can filter ports that require interaction out with
make BATCH=yes
Files Summary
=============
/usr/ports (PORTSDIR):
the whole port collection
/usr/ports/<category>/<portname>:
where to find a given port
/usr/ports/INDEX:
all distfiles, rebuilt with make index
/usr/ports/distfiles (DISTFILES):
repository for distribution files and distribution patches
/cdrom/distfiles (CDROM_SITE):
standard location for distfiles off a CD
/usr/ports/packages/${MACHINE_ARCH} (PACKAGES):
where binary packages are built (by category. Normally everything
ends up under All, with symlinks for each category)
/usr/ports/<category>/<portname>/w-${PKGNAME}:
where the ports mechanism does the building. This is normally a
real directory, but you can set WRKOBJDIR to point to another
base which is not /usr/ports, and work/ will be a link to
${WRKOBJDIR}/category/portname/work. This can be useful to
mount a master /usr/ports directory by NFS on several
architectures. Normally, you first
cd /usr/ports && make WRKOBJDIR=path obj
on the master machine, which creates the symbolic links, so that
you can mount your master /usr/ports read-only.
/usr/ports/<category>/<portname>/pkg/SECURITY:
information relative to a security audit of the port. Usually
missing.
/usr/ports/infrastructure:
paraphernalia around the ports tree
/usr/ports/db/network.conf:
your local network configuration (ftp sites)
/var/db/pkg:
installed ports, see pkg_add(1).
/usr/local (LOCALBASE):
where normal ports install themselves.
Other tweaks
============
NO_IGNORE: coerce fetch, build, install... into doing their job even though
there might be a good reason not to. Good reasons include BROKEN,
ONLY_FOR_ARCH, IS_INTERACTIVE in BATCH mode. This is a dangerous option.
Keeping up with the Jones, ports as a moving target
===================================================
The OpenBSD ports tree is growing from release to release. It needs
people to write and test new ports.
Like for src, you can choose to live on the bleeding edge by updating
your ports dir thru cvs or ftp, and contribute bug-reports. You must
update both ports and src in synch.
If you prefer to stay with a stable release, we try to make sure
the distfiles for a given release stay on the OpenBSD site between
releases.
No matter how fast we update the tree it seems that we are always
behind. There are always new versions of software out there, without
an existing port. Very often, no one had time to update the port yet,
or it is very likely that the new version has not been tested enough
yet to deem it reasonable to upgrade the port.
You may wish to contribute, by updating ports or creating new ports.
please visit
http://www.openbsd.org/porting.html
and always remember to communicate with OpenBSD project members on
ports@openbsd.org. Why create a brand new shiny port to discover that
someone was already working on it, and they committed their new version
ten minutes before you announced yours ?
$OpenBSD: README,v 1.12 2002/04/21 03:59:37 pvalchev Exp $
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