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 third-party programs without losing time in patching, configuring, etc. This work is done by a few volunteers who spend hours making your favorite applications work 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 commits 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 ports 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 types of submissions; new ports and updates. New ports are generally posted as an attachment or url to a tarball which contains the port tree. A good idea is to extract it into the /usr/ports/mystuff/ directory and then test it. Updates are generally a diff against the current ports tree, so it is suggested that you copy the port into mystuff/ 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 correctly :

• fetch : You just need to verify that distfile(s) are correctly downloaded.
• extract : Generally extract is done without a 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 issues 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 installation 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 on it. If we have ten posts where people say that the port runs fine under different architectures then the commit is done faster. If it does not work then you must give some information using tools such as portslogger.

Example :

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

This will redirect 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 diffs to correct bugs, add flavors, or other enhancements.