Annotation of www/ports.html, Revision 1.7
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5: OpenBSD ports mechanism
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9: <META NAME="description" CONTENT="How OpenBSD can make use of the FreeBSD ports">
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1.5 tacho 16: <H2>OpenBSD ports mechanism</H2>
17: <P>
18: <H3><STRONG>History</STRONG></H3>
19: <P>
20: OpenBSD is a fairly complete system of its own, but still there are a lot of
21: software that one might want see added. However there is the problem on where
22: to draw the line on what to include and not, as well as licensing and export
23: restrictions problems. Some things just can't be shipped with the system.
24: We wanted to find a way for users to easily get software we don't provide
25: and started to look around. We didn't have to look far as a sibling project,
26: <A HREF="http://www.freebsd.org/">FreeBSD</A>, had an excellent mechanism for
27: exactly this purpose called
28: <A HREF="http://www.freebsd.org/ports/">"The ports collection"</A>. After
29: thinking about it for a while we decided to try to use their collection as is,
30: feeding back necessary patches to make the ports work on OpenBSD as well
31: to the FreeBSD maintainers.
32: </P>
33: <H3><STRONG>Short description and setup</STRONG></H3>
34: <P>
35: The ports idea is to have, for each piece of software, a Makefile that
36: describes where to fetch it, how to do the fetch, what it is depending upon
37: (if anything), how to alter the sources (if needed) and how to configure,
38: build and install it. Furthermore some patches will have to be kept in the
39: "port" as well as some administration files for the package registry utilities.
40: Normally this information is kept in an hierarchy under /usr/ports (however,
41: this is configurable). I recommend reading the
42: <A HREF="http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/ports.html">ports chapter</A> in the
43: <A HREF="http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/">FreeBSD handbook</A> to get
44: information on how to setup this hierarchy. A current gzipped tar-archive
45: of the FreeBSD ports can be found
46: <A HREF="ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/FreeBSD-current/ports.tar.gz">here
47: </A>.
48: </P>
49: <H3><STRONG>Example</STRONG></H3>
50: <P>
51: Let's say you managed to get a ports tree sitting under /usr/ports, then you
52: should be able to something like this:
53: <PRE>
1.1 niklas 54: cd /usr/ports/archivers/unzip
55: make
56: su
57: make install
58: exit
1.5 tacho 59: </PRE>
60: Easy, huh?
61: </P>
62: <H3><STRONG>Problems and contacts</STRONG></H3>
63: <P>
64: As the ports collection really is a FreeBSD thing, there are ports that do not
65: work in OpenBSD for various reasons. But this is going to change in the near future.
1.7 ! joey 66: Our <A HREF="mailto:joey@openbsd.org">ports coordinator</A> has set up a
1.5 tacho 67: <A HREF="http://deeplaid.uni-svishtov.bg/ports-status.html">page with the current status</A>
68: - what is done, what is being worked on right now, on what architecture, etc.
69: If you have trouble with ports contact either
1.7 ! joey 70: <A HREF="mailto:joey@openbsd.org">Ejovi Nuwere</A> (preferably),
1.5 tacho 71: <A HREF="mailto:niklas@openbsd.org">Niklas Hallqvist</A> or
72: <A HREF="mailto:imp@openbsd.org">Warner Losh</A> and give us either patches
73: on how to fix things or, if you cannot do this, point us at the problematic
74: port and tell us what fails and we shall try to fix it.
75: </P>
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78: <A HREF="mailto:www@openbsd.org">www@openbsd.org</A>
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