Port's Testing Guide

Index

• Introduction
• How
• First step
• Testing
• Commenting
• More testing

Introduction

The ports tree is an huge piece of work that permits to OpenBSD users to use extra stuff without loosing time in patching, configuring, etc. This work is made by a few volunteers who spend hours to make your favorite applications working fine on your system. Many people think that they can't help our project because they don't have enough knowledge, this is false because they can help porters to work better and faster.

How

Simply by testing submitted updates or new ports which are posted on ports@openbsd.org. By doing this you reduce the latency of commit and also increase the number of ports to be committed (many ports are not committed because of lack of testing !).

First step

Before starting you must know that port development is done by following OpenBSD-current, you can find instructions on following current source and upgrade faq. When it's done you are ready to follow ports@openbsd.org .

Testing

Now that you are on the mailing-list you can find two type of submits : new ports and updates. New ports are generally posted as an attachment or an url to a tarball which contains the port tree. A good idea is to extract it into the /usr/ports/mystuff directory and then you can test it. Updates are generally a diff against current ports tree, so it is suggested to copy the port in mytstuff/ and apply the diff to prevent breaking your tree.

You will need to perform step by step the building of the port to verify that every target is going right :

• fetch : you just need to verify that distfile(s) are correctly downloaded.
• extract : generally extract is done without problem, so you can ignore this target in most cases.
• patch : check if patches apply correctly and track down forgotten .orig .
• configure : for ports which use a configure script you can verify they have correct path for dependencies, use(less) features, etc ...
• build : the build itself should not give errors but could contain minor warnings about tmpnam issue to be resolved by using mkstemp.
• fake : this target is faking installation of the package to prepare for packaging. you should verify that files are installed in fake directory.
• package : package creation can break if pkg/PLIST* and/or pkg/PFRAG* are wrong.
• install : check that package install works fine.
• deinstall : don't forget to test deinstall.

You could also check some pkg/ stuff like DESCR, MESSAGE, INSTALL, DEINSTALL

Commenting

At the end of the test comes the really important thing : comments. Even if the port is working fine you must comment it, if we have ten posts where people say that the port runs fine under different arch then commit is done faster. If it does not work then you must give some information, you have tools for that like portslogger.

Example :

    # make install | /usr/ports/infrastructure/build/portslogger

This will catch the output into a log file located in the current directory.

More testing

For those who are more skilled they can test targets like lib-depends-check, look at patches and pkg stuff. You can also provide diff to correct bugs or to add flavors, etc ...