OpenBSD ports mechanism

History

OpenBSD is a fairly complete system of its own, but still there is a lot of software that one might want see added. However there is the problem on where to draw the line on what to include and not in a small unix-like operating system, as well as licensing and export restrictions problems. Some things just can't be shipped with the system. We wanted to find a way for users to easily get software we don't provide and started to look around. We didn't have to look far as a sibling project, FreeBSD, had an excellent mechanism for exactly this purpose called "The ports collection". After thinking about it for a while we decided to try to use their collection as is, but due to incompatibility problems between FreeBSD and OpenBSD we decided to branch out and create our very own OpenBSD Ports Project using FreeBSD's as a starting point.

Short description and setup

The ports idea is to have, for each piece of software, a Makefile that describes where to fetch it, how to do the fetch, what it is depending upon (if anything), how to alter the sources (if needed) and how to configure, build and install it. Furthermore some patches will have to be kept in the "port" as well as some administration files for the package registry utilities. Normally this information is kept in an hierarchy under /usr/ports (however, this is configurable).

We recommend reading the ports chapter in the FreeBSD handbook to get information on how to setup this hierarchy until OpenBSD can complete its own ports.helpfile

Example

Let's say you managed to get a ports tree sitting under /usr/ports, then you should be able to something like this:

% cd /usr/ports/archivers/unzip
% make
% su
# make install
# exit

Easy, huh?

Problems and contacts

Our ports coordinator is currently working on a ports statues page - what is done, what is being worked on right now, on what architecture, etc. If you have trouble with ports contact either Ejovi Nuwere (preferably), Gene Skonicki, or Todd Tyrone Fries and provide either patches or details for how to fix things or, if you cannot do this, point us at the problematic port and tell us what fails and we shall try to fix it.

www@openbsd.org
$OpenBSD: ports.html,v 1.8 1997/11/18 08:12:33 deraadt Exp $