Annotation of www/ports.html, Revision 1.2
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4: <title>OpenBSD ports mechanism</title>
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7: <meta name="description" content="How OpenBSD can make use of the FreeBSD ports">
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10: <meta name="copyright" content="This document copyright 1997 by the OpenBSD project">
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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
1.2 ! deraadt 24: restrictions problems. Some things just can't be shipped with the system.
1.1 niklas 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.
1.2 ! deraadt 77: </p>
1.1 niklas 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>
1.2 ! deraadt 83: <small>$OpenBSD: ports.html,v 1.1 1997/02/03 07:01:58 niklas Exp $</small>
1.1 niklas 84:
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