Annotation of www/ports.html, Revision 1.4
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7: <meta name="description" content="How OpenBSD can make use of the FreeBSD ports">
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1.1 niklas 16:
17: <h2>OpenBSD ports mechanism</h2>
18:
1.4 ! downsj 19: <p>
1.1 niklas 20: <h3><strong>History</strong></h3>
21:
22: <p>
23: OpenBSD is a fairly complete system of its own, but still there are a lot of
24: software that one might want see added. However there is the problem on where
25: to draw the line on what to include and not, as well as licensing and export
1.2 deraadt 26: restrictions problems. Some things just can't be shipped with the system.
1.1 niklas 27: We wanted to find a way for users to easily get software we don't provide
28: and started to look around. We didn't have to look far as a sibling project,
29: <a href=http://www.freebsd.org/>FreeBSD</a>, had an excellent mechanism for
30: exactly this purpose called
31: <a href=http://www.freebsd.org/ports/>"The ports collection"</a>. After
32: thinking about it for a while we decided to try to use their collection as is,
33: feeding back necessary patches to make the ports work on OpenBSD as well
34: to the FreeBSD maintainers.
35: </p>
36:
37: <h3><strong>Short description and setup</strong></h3>
38:
39: <p>
40: The ports idea is to have, for each piece of software, a Makefile that
41: describes where to fetch it, how to do the fetch, what it is depending upon
42: (if anything), how to alter the sources (if needed) and how to configure,
43: build and install it. Furthermore some patches will have to be kept in the
44: "port" as well as some administration files for the package registry utilities.
45: Normally this information is kept in an hierarchy under /usr/ports (however,
46: this is configurable). I recommend reading the
47: <a href=http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/ports.html>ports chapter</a> in the
48: <a href=http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/>FreeBSD handbook</a> to get
49: information on how to setup this hierarchy. A current gzipped tar-archive
50: of the FreeBSD ports can be found
51: <a href=ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/FreeBSD-current/ports.tar.gz>here
52: </a>.
53: </p>
54:
55: <h3><strong>Example</strong></h3>
56:
57: <p>
58: Let's say you managed to get a ports tree sitting under /usr/ports, then you
59: should be able to something like this:
60: <pre>
61: cd /usr/ports/archivers/unzip
62: make
63: su
64: make install
65: exit
66: </pre>
67: Easy, huh?
68: </p>
69:
70: <h3><strong>Problems and contacts</strong></h3>
71:
72: <p>
1.3 niklas 73: As the ports collection really is a FreeBSD thing, there are ports that do not
1.1 niklas 74: work in OpenBSD for various reasons. If you find such a port contact either
75: <a href=mailto:niklas@openbsd.org>Niklas Hallqvist</a> or
76: <a href=mailto:imp@openbsd.org>Warner Losh</a> and give us either patches
77: on how to fix things or, if you cannot do this, point us at the problematic
78: port and tell us what fails and we shall try to fix it.
1.2 deraadt 79: </p>
1.1 niklas 80:
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84: <br>
1.4 ! downsj 85: <small>$OpenBSD: ports.html,v 1.3 1997/02/03 12:55:49 niklas Exp $</small>
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