Annotation of www/ports.html, Revision 1.1
1.1 ! niklas 1: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML Strict//EN">
! 2: <html>
! 3: <head>
! 4: <title>OpenBSD ports mechanism</title>
! 5: <link rev=made href=mailto:www@openbsd.org>
! 6: <meta name="resource-type" content="document">
! 7: <meta name="description" content="How OpenBSD can make use of the FreeBSD ports">
! 8: <meta name="keywords" content="openbsd,ports">
! 9: <meta name="distribution" content="global">
! 10: <meta name="copyright" content="This document copyright 1997 by the OpenBSD project">
! 11: </head>
! 12:
! 13: <body>
! 14:
! 15: <h2>OpenBSD ports mechanism</h2>
! 16:
! 17: <hr>
! 18: <h3><strong>History</strong></h3>
! 19:
! 20: <p>
! 21: OpenBSD is a fairly complete system of its own, but still there are a lot of
! 22: software that one might want see added. However there is the problem on where
! 23: to draw the line on what to include and not, as well as licensing and export
! 24: restrictions problems. Somethings just can't be shipped with the system.
! 25: We wanted to find a way for users to easily get software we don't provide
! 26: and started to look around. We didn't have to look far as a sibling project,
! 27: <a href=http://www.freebsd.org/>FreeBSD</a>, had an excellent mechanism for
! 28: exactly this purpose called
! 29: <a href=http://www.freebsd.org/ports/>"The ports collection"</a>. After
! 30: thinking about it for a while we decided to try to use their collection as is,
! 31: feeding back necessary patches to make the ports work on OpenBSD as well
! 32: to the FreeBSD maintainers.
! 33: </p>
! 34:
! 35: <h3><strong>Short description and setup</strong></h3>
! 36:
! 37: <p>
! 38: The ports idea is to have, for each piece of software, a Makefile that
! 39: describes where to fetch it, how to do the fetch, what it is depending upon
! 40: (if anything), how to alter the sources (if needed) and how to configure,
! 41: build and install it. Furthermore some patches will have to be kept in the
! 42: "port" as well as some administration files for the package registry utilities.
! 43: Normally this information is kept in an hierarchy under /usr/ports (however,
! 44: this is configurable). I recommend reading the
! 45: <a href=http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/ports.html>ports chapter</a> in the
! 46: <a href=http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/>FreeBSD handbook</a> to get
! 47: information on how to setup this hierarchy. A current gzipped tar-archive
! 48: of the FreeBSD ports can be found
! 49: <a href=ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/FreeBSD-current/ports.tar.gz>here
! 50: </a>.
! 51: </p>
! 52:
! 53: <h3><strong>Example</strong></h3>
! 54:
! 55: <p>
! 56: Let's say you managed to get a ports tree sitting under /usr/ports, then you
! 57: should be able to something like this:
! 58: <pre>
! 59: cd /usr/ports/archivers/unzip
! 60: make
! 61: su
! 62: make install
! 63: exit
! 64: </pre>
! 65: Easy, huh?
! 66: </p>
! 67:
! 68: <h3><strong>Problems and contacts</strong></h3>
! 69:
! 70: <p>
! 71: As the ports collection reall is a FreeBSD thing, there are ports that do not
! 72: work in OpenBSD for various reasons. If you find such a port contact either
! 73: <a href=mailto:niklas@openbsd.org>Niklas Hallqvist</a> or
! 74: <a href=mailto:imp@openbsd.org>Warner Losh</a> and give us either patches
! 75: on how to fix things or, if you cannot do this, point us at the problematic
! 76: port and tell us what fails and we shall try to fix it.
! 77: /p>
! 78:
! 79: <hr>
! 80: <a href=index.html><img src=back.gif border=0 alt=OpenBSD></a>
! 81: <a href=mailto:www@openbsd.org>www@openbsd.org</a>
! 82: <br>
! 83: <small>$OpenBSD$</small>
! 84:
! 85: </body>
! 86: </html>