diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/book.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/book.sgml index 5bc4c99dbb..73406b9e3d 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/book.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/book.sgml @@ -1,14439 +1,14445 @@ %books.ent; ]> FreeBSD Porter's Handbook The FreeBSD Documentation Project April 2000 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 The FreeBSD Documentation Project &bookinfo.trademarks; &bookinfo.legalnotice; Introduction The FreeBSD ports collection is the way almost everyone installs applications ("ports") on FreeBSD. Like everything else about FreeBSD, it is primarily a volunteer effort. It is important to keep this in mind when reading this document. In FreeBSD, anyone may submit a new port, or volunteer to maintain an existing port if it is unmaintained—you do not need any special commit privileges to do so. Making a port yourself So, you are interested in making your own port or upgrading an existing one? Great! What follows are some guidelines for creating a new port for FreeBSD. If you want to upgrade an existing port, you should read this and then read . When this document is not sufficiently detailed, you should refer to /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.port.mk, which all port Makefiles include. Even if you do not hack Makefiles daily, it is well commented, and you will still gain much knowledge from it. Additionally, you may send specific questions to the &a.ports;. Only a fraction of the variables (VAR) that can be overridden are mentioned in this document. Most (if not all) are documented at the start of /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.port.mk; the others probably ought to be. Note that this file uses a non-standard tab setting: Emacs and Vim should recognize the setting on loading the file. Both &man.vi.1; and &man.ex.1; can be set to use the correct value by typing :set tabstop=4 once the file has been loaded. Quick Porting This section tells you how to do a quick port. In many cases, it is not sufficient, so you will have to read further on into the document. First, get the original tarball and put it into DISTDIR, which defaults to /usr/ports/distfiles. The following assumes that the software compiled out-of-the-box, i.e., there was absolutely no change required for the port to work on your FreeBSD box. If you needed to change something, you will have to refer to the next section too. Writing the <filename>Makefile</filename> The minimal Makefile would look something like this: # New ports collection makefile for: oneko # Date created: 5 December 1994 # Whom: asami # # $FreeBSD$ # PORTNAME= oneko PORTVERSION= 1.1b CATEGORIES= games MASTER_SITES= ftp://ftp.cs.columbia.edu/archives/X11R5/contrib/ MAINTAINER= asami@FreeBSD.org COMMENT= A cat chasing a mouse all over the screen MAN1= oneko.1 MANCOMPRESSED= yes USE_IMAKE= yes .include <bsd.port.mk> See if you can figure it out. Do not worry about the contents of the $FreeBSD$ line, it will be filled in automatically by CVS when the port is imported to our main ports tree. You can find a more detailed example in the sample Makefile section. Writing the description files There are two description files that are required for any port, whether they actually package or not. They are pkg-descr and pkg-plist. Their pkg- prefix distinguishes them from other files. <filename>pkg-descr</filename> This is a longer description of the port. One to a few paragraphs concisely explaining what the port does is sufficient. This is not a manual or an in-depth description on how to use or compile the port! Please be careful if you are copying from the README or manpage; too often they are not a concise description of the port or are in an awkward format (e.g., manpages have justified spacing). If the ported software has an official WWW homepage, you should list it here. Prefix one of the websites with WWW: so that automated tools will work correctly. The following example shows how your pkg-descr should look: This is a port of oneko, in which a cat chases a poor mouse all over the screen. : (etc.) WWW: http://www.oneko.org/ <filename>pkg-plist</filename> This file lists all the files installed by the port. It is also called the packing list because the package is generated by packing the files listed here. The pathnames are relative to the installation prefix (usually /usr/local or /usr/X11R6). If you are using the MANn variables (as you should be), do not list any manpages here. If the port creates directories during installation, make sure to add @dirrm lines to remove them when the package is deleted. Here is a small example: bin/oneko lib/X11/app-defaults/Oneko lib/X11/oneko/cat1.xpm lib/X11/oneko/cat2.xpm lib/X11/oneko/mouse.xpm @dirrm lib/X11/oneko Refer to the &man.pkg.create.1; manual page for details on the packing list. It is recommended that you keep all the filenames in this file sorted alphabetically. It will make verifying the changes when you upgrade the port much easier. Creating a packing list manually can be a very tedious task. If the port installs a large numbers of files, creating the packing list automatically might save time. There is only one case when pkg-plist can be omitted from a port. If the port installs just a handful of files, and perhaps directories, the files and directories may be listed in the variables PLIST_FILES and PLIST_DIRS, respectively, within the port's Makefile. For instance, we could get along without pkg-plist in the above oneko port by adding the following lines to the Makefile: PLIST_FILES= bin/oneko \ lib/X11/app-defaults/Oneko \ lib/X11/oneko/cat1.xpm \ lib/X11/oneko/cat2.xpm \ lib/X11/oneko/mouse.xpm PLIST_DIRS= lib/X11/oneko Of course, PLIST_DIRS should be left unset if a port installs no directories of its own. The price for this way of listing port's files and directories is that you cannot use command sequences described in &man.pkg.create.1;. Therefore, it is suitable only for simple ports and makes them even simpler. At the same time, it has the advantage of reducing the number of files in the ports collection. Please consider using this technique before you resort to pkg-plist. Later we will see how pkg-plist and PLIST_FILES can be used to fulfill more sophisticated tasks. Creating the checksum file Just type make makesum. The ports make rules will automatically generate the file distinfo. If a file fetched has its checksum changed regularly and you are certain the source is trusted (i.e. it comes from manufacturer CDs or documentation generated daily), you should specify these files in the IGNOREFILES variable. Then the checksum is not calculated for that file when you run make makesum, but set to IGNORE. Testing the port You should make sure that the port rules do exactly what you want them to do, including packaging up the port. These are the important points you need to verify. pkg-plist does not contain anything not installed by your port pkg-plist contains everything that is installed by your port Your port can be installed multiple times using the reinstall target Your port cleans up after itself upon deinstall Recommended test ordering make install make package make deinstall pkg_add package-name make deinstall make reinstall make package Make sure that there are not any warnings issued in any of the package and deinstall stages. After step 3, check to see if all the new directories are correctly deleted. Also, try using the software after step 4, to ensure that it works correctly when installed from a package. The most thorough way to automate these steps is via installing the ports tinderbox. This maintains jails in which you can test all of the above steps without changing the state of your running system. Please see ports/ports-mgmt/tinderbox for more information. Checking your port with <command>portlint</command> Please use portlint to see if your port conforms to our guidelines. The ports-mgmt/portlint program is part of the ports collection. In particular, you may want to check if the Makefile is in the right shape and the package is named appropriately. Submitting the port First, make sure you have read the DOs and DON'Ts section. Now that you are happy with your port, the only thing remaining is to put it in the main FreeBSD ports tree and make everybody else happy about it too. We do not need your work directory or the pkgname.tgz package, so delete them now. Next, simply include the output of shar `find port_dir` in a bug report and send it with the &man.send-pr.1; program (see Bug Reports and General Commentary for more information about &man.send-pr.1;). Be sure to classify the bug report as category ports and class change-request (Do not mark the report confidential!). Also add a short description of the program you ported to the Description field of the PR and the shar to the Fix field. You can make our work a lot easier, if you use a good description in the synopsis of the problem report. We prefer something like New port: <category>/<portname> <short description of the port> for new ports and Update port: <category>/<portname> <short description of the update> for port updates. If you stick to this scheme, the chance that someone will take a look at your PR soon is much better. One more time, do not include the original source distfile, the work directory, or the package you built with make package. After you have submitted your port, please be patient. Sometimes it can take a few months before a port is included in FreeBSD, although it might only take a few days. You can view the list of ports waiting to be committed to FreeBSD. Once we have looked at your port, we will get back to you if necessary, and put it in the tree. Your name will also appear in the list of Additional FreeBSD Contributors and other files. Isn't that great?!? :-) Slow Porting Ok, so it was not that simple, and the port required some modifications to get it to work. In this section, we will explain, step by step, how to modify it to get it to work with the ports paradigm. How things work First, this is the sequence of events which occurs when the user first types make in your port's directory. You may find that having bsd.port.mk in another window while you read this really helps to understand it. But do not worry if you do not really understand what bsd.port.mk is doing, not many people do... :-> The fetch target is run. The fetch target is responsible for making sure that the tarball exists locally in DISTDIR. If fetch cannot find the required files in DISTDIR it will look up the URL MASTER_SITES, which is set in the Makefile, as well as our main FTP site at , where we put sanctioned distfiles as backup. It will then attempt to fetch the named distribution file with FETCH, assuming that the requesting site has direct access to the Internet. If that succeeds, it will save the file in DISTDIR for future use and proceed. The extract target is run. It looks for your port's distribution file (typically a gzip'd tarball) in DISTDIR and unpacks it into a temporary subdirectory specified by WRKDIR (defaults to work). The patch target is run. First, any patches defined in PATCHFILES are applied. Second, if any patch files named patch-* are found in PATCHDIR (defaults to the files subdirectory), they are applied at this time in alphabetical order. The configure target is run. This can do any one of many different things. If it exists, scripts/configure is run. If HAS_CONFIGURE or GNU_CONFIGURE is set, WRKSRC/configure is run. If USE_IMAKE is set, XMKMF (default: xmkmf -a) is run. The build target is run. This is responsible for descending into the port's private working directory (WRKSRC) and building it. If USE_GMAKE is set, GNU make will be used, otherwise the system make will be used. The above are the default actions. In addition, you can define targets pre-something or post-something, or put scripts with those names, in the scripts subdirectory, and they will be run before or after the default actions are done. For example, if you have a post-extract target defined in your Makefile, and a file pre-build in the scripts subdirectory, the post-extract target will be called after the regular extraction actions, and the pre-build script will be executed before the default build rules are done. It is recommended that you use Makefile targets if the actions are simple enough, because it will be easier for someone to figure out what kind of non-default action the port requires. The default actions are done by the bsd.port.mk targets do-something. For example, the commands to extract a port are in the target do-extract. If you are not happy with the default target, you can fix it by redefining the do-something target in your Makefile. The main targets (e.g., extract, configure, etc.) do nothing more than make sure all the stages up to that one are completed and call the real targets or scripts, and they are not intended to be changed. If you want to fix the extraction, fix do-extract, but never ever change the way extract operates! Now that you understand what goes on when the user types make, let us go through the recommended steps to create the perfect port. Getting the original sources Get the original sources (normally) as a compressed tarball (foo.tar.gz or foo.tar.Z) and copy it into DISTDIR. Always use mainstream sources when and where you can. You will need to set the variable MASTER_SITES to reflect where the original tarball resides. You will find convenient shorthand definitions for most mainstream sites in bsd.sites.mk. Please use these sites—and the associated definitions—if at all possible, to help avoid the problem of having the same information repeated over again many times in the source base. As these sites tend to change over time, this becomes a maintenance nightmare for everyone involved. If you cannot find a FTP/HTTP site that is well-connected to the net, or can only find sites that have irritatingly non-standard formats, you might want to put a copy on a reliable FTP or HTTP server that you control (e.g., your home page). If you cannot find somewhere convenient and reliable to put the distfile we can house it ourselves on ftp.FreeBSD.org; however, this is the least-preferred solution. The distfile must be placed into ~/public_distfiles/ of someone's freefall account. Ask the person who commits your port to do this. This person will also set MASTER_SITES to MASTER_SITE_LOCAL and MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR to their freefall username. If your port's distfile changes all the time without any kind of version update by the author, consider putting the distfile on your home page and listing it as the first MASTER_SITES. If you can, try to talk the port author out of doing this; it really does help to establish some kind of source code control. Hosting your own version will prevent users from getting checksum mismatch errors, and also reduce the workload of maintainers of our FTP site. Also, if there is only one master site for the port, it is recommended that you house a backup at your site and list it as the second MASTER_SITES. If your port requires some additional `patches' that are available on the Internet, fetch them too and put them in DISTDIR. Do not worry if they come from a site other than where you got the main source tarball, we have a way to handle these situations (see the description of PATCHFILES below). Modifying the port Unpack a copy of the tarball in a private directory and make whatever changes are necessary to get the port to compile properly under the current version of FreeBSD. Keep careful track of everything you do, as you will be automating the process shortly. Everything, including the deletion, addition, or modification of files should be doable using an automated script or patch file when your port is finished. If your port requires significant user interaction/customization to compile or install, you should take a look at one of Larry Wall's classic Configure scripts and perhaps do something similar yourself. The goal of the new ports collection is to make each port as plug-and-play as possible for the end-user while using a minimum of disk space. Unless explicitly stated, patch files, scripts, and other files you have created and contributed to the FreeBSD ports collection are assumed to be covered by the standard BSD copyright conditions. Patching In the preparation of the port, files that have been added or changed can be picked up with a &man.diff.1; for later feeding to &man.patch.1;. Each patch you wish to apply should be saved into a file named patch-* where * indicates the pathname of the file that is patched, such as patch-Imakefile or patch-src-config.h. These files should be stored in PATCHDIR (usually files/, from where they will be automatically applied. All patches must be relative to WRKSRC (generally the directory your port's tarball unpacks itself into, that being where the build is done). To make fixes and upgrades easier, you should avoid having more than one patch fix the same file (e.g., patch-file and patch-file2 both changing WRKSRC/foobar.c). Please only use characters [-+._a-zA-Z0-9] for naming your patches. Do not use any other characters besides them. Do not name your patches like patch-aa or patch-ab etc, always mention path and file name in patch names. Do not put RCS strings in patches. CVS will mangle them when we put the files into the ports tree, and when we check them out again, they will come out different and the patch will fail. RCS strings are surrounded by dollar ($) signs, and typically start with $Id or $RCS. Using the recurse () option to &man.diff.1; to generate patches is fine, but please take a look at the resulting patches to make sure you do not have any unnecessary junk in there. In particular, diffs between two backup files, Makefiles when the port uses Imake or GNU configure, etc., are unnecessary and should be deleted. If you had to edit configure.in and run autoconf to regenerate configure, do not take the diffs of configure (it often grows to a few thousand lines!); define USE_AUTOTOOLS=autoconf:261 and take the diffs of configure.in. Also, try to minimize the amount of non-functional whitespace changes in your patches. It is common in Open Source world that projects share large amount of code base, but obey different style and indenting rules. If you take working piece of functionality from one project to fix similar area in another, please be careful: the resulting line patch may be full of non-functional changes. It does not only increase the size of the CVS repository but makes it hard to find out what had exactly caused the problem and what did you change at all. If you had to delete a file, then you can do it in the post-extract target rather than as part of the patch. Simple replacements can be performed directly from the port Makefile using the in-place mode of &man.sed.1;. This is very useful when you need to patch in a variable value. Example: post-patch: @${REINPLACE_CMD} -e 's|for Linux|for FreeBSD|g' ${WRKSRC}/README @${REINPLACE_CMD} -e 's|-pthread|${PTHREAD_LIBS}|' ${WRKSRC}/configure Quite often, there is a situation when the software being ported, especially if it is primarily developed on &windows;, uses the CR/LF convention for most of its source files. This may cause problems with further patching, compiler warnings, scripts execution (/bin/sh^M not found), etc. To quickly convert all files from CR/LF to just LF, add USE_DOS2UNIX=yes to the port Makefile. A list of files to convert can be specified: USE_DOS2UNIX= util.c util.h If you want to convert a group of files across subdirectories, DOS2UNIX_REGEX can be used. Its argument is a find compatible regular expression. More on the format is in &man.re.format.7;. This option is useful for converting all files of a given extension, for example all source code files leaving binary files intact: USE_DOS2UNIX= yes DOS2UNIX_REGEX= .*\.(c|cpp|h) Configuring Include any additional customization commands in your configure script and save it in the scripts subdirectory. As mentioned above, you can also do this with Makefile targets and/or scripts with the name pre-configure or post-configure. Handling user input If your port requires user input to build, configure, or install, you must set IS_INTERACTIVE in your Makefile. This will allow overnight builds to skip your port if the user sets the variable BATCH in his environment (and if the user sets the variable INTERACTIVE, then only those ports requiring interaction are built). This will save a lot of wasted time on the set of machines that continually build ports (see below). It is also recommended that if there are reasonable default answers to the questions, you check the PACKAGE_BUILDING variable and turn off the interactive script when it is set. This will allow us to build the packages for CDROMs and FTP. Configuring the Makefile Configuring the Makefile is pretty simple, and again we suggest that you look at existing examples before starting. Also, there is a sample Makefile in this handbook, so take a look and please follow the ordering of variables and sections in that template to make your port easier for others to read. Now, consider the following problems in sequence as you design your new Makefile: The original source Does it live in DISTDIR as a standard gzip'd tarball named something like foozolix-1.2.tar.gz? If so, you can go on to the next step. If not, you should look at overriding any of the DISTVERSION, DISTNAME, EXTRACT_CMD, EXTRACT_BEFORE_ARGS, EXTRACT_AFTER_ARGS, EXTRACT_SUFX, or DISTFILES variables, depending on how alien a format your port's distribution file is. (The most common case is EXTRACT_SUFX=.tar.Z, when the tarball is condensed by regular compress, not gzip.) In the worst case, you can simply create your own do-extract target to override the default, though this should be rarely, if ever, necessary. Naming The first part of the port's Makefile names the port, describes its version number, and lists it in the correct category. <makevar>PORTNAME</makevar> and <makevar>PORTVERSION</makevar> You should set PORTNAME to the base name of your port, and PORTVERSION to the version number of the port. <makevar>PORTREVISION</makevar> and <makevar>PORTEPOCH</makevar> <makevar>PORTREVISION</makevar> The PORTREVISION variable is a monotonically increasing value which is reset to 0 with every increase of PORTVERSION (i.e. every time a new official vendor release is made), and appended to the package name if non-zero. Changes to PORTREVISION are used by automated tools (e.g. &man.pkg.version.1;) to highlight the fact that a new package is available. PORTREVISION should be increased each time a change is made to the port which significantly affects the content or structure of the derived package. Examples of when PORTREVISION should be bumped: Addition of patches to correct security vulnerabilities, bugs, or to add new functionality to the port. Changes to the port Makefile to enable or disable compile-time options in the package. Changes in the packing list or the install-time behavior of the package (e.g. change to a script which generates initial data for the package, like ssh host keys). Version bump of a port's shared library dependency (in this case, someone trying to install the old package after installing a newer version of the dependency will fail since it will look for the old libfoo.x instead of libfoo.(x+1)). Silent changes to the port distfile which have significant functional differences, i.e. changes to the distfile requiring a correction to distinfo with no corresponding change to PORTVERSION, where a diff -ru of the old and new versions shows non-trivial changes to the code. Examples of changes which do not require a PORTREVISION bump: Style changes to the port skeleton with no functional change to what appears in the resulting package. Changes to MASTER_SITES or other functional changes to the port which do not affect the resulting package. Trivial patches to the distfile such as correction of typos, which are not important enough that users of the package should go to the trouble of upgrading. Build fixes which cause a package to become compilable where it was previously failing (as long as the changes do not introduce any functional change on any other platforms on which the port did previously build). Since PORTREVISION reflects the content of the package, if the package was not previously buildable then there is no need to increase PORTREVISION to mark a change. A rule of thumb is to ask yourself whether a change committed to a port is something which everyone would benefit from having (either because of an enhancement, fix, or by virtue that the new package will actually work at all), and weigh that against that fact that it will cause everyone who regularly updates their ports tree to be compelled to update. If yes, the PORTREVISION should be bumped. <makevar>PORTEPOCH</makevar> From time to time a software vendor or FreeBSD porter will do something silly and release a version of their software which is actually numerically less than the previous version. An example of this is a port which goes from foo-20000801 to foo-1.0 (the former will be incorrectly treated as a newer version since 20000801 is a numerically greater value than 1). In situations such as this, the PORTEPOCH version should be increased. If PORTEPOCH is nonzero it is appended to the package name as described in section 0 above. PORTEPOCH must never be decreased or reset to zero, because that would cause comparison to a package from an earlier epoch to fail (i.e. the package would not be detected as out of date): the new version number (e.g. 1.0,1 in the above example) is still numerically less than the previous version (20000801), but the ,1 suffix is treated specially by automated tools and found to be greater than the implied suffix ,0 on the earlier package. Dropping or resetting PORTEPOCH incorrectly leads to no end of grief; if you do not understand the above discussion, please keep after it until you do, or ask questions on the mailing lists. It is expected that PORTEPOCH will not be used for the majority of ports, and that sensible use of PORTVERSION can often pre-empt it becoming necessary if a future release of the software should change the version structure. However, care is needed by FreeBSD porters when a vendor release is made without an official version number — such as a code snapshot release. The temptation is to label the release with the release date, which will cause problems as in the example above when a new official release is made. For example, if a snapshot release is made on the date 20000917, and the previous version of the software was version 1.2, the snapshot release should be given a PORTVERSION of 1.2.20000917 or similar, not 20000917, so that the succeeding release, say 1.3, is still a numerically greater value. Example of <makevar>PORTREVISION</makevar> and <makevar>PORTEPOCH</makevar> usage The gtkmumble port, version 0.10, is committed to the ports collection: PORTNAME= gtkmumble PORTVERSION= 0.10 PKGNAME becomes gtkmumble-0.10. A security hole is discovered which requires a local FreeBSD patch. PORTREVISION is bumped accordingly. PORTNAME= gtkmumble PORTVERSION= 0.10 PORTREVISION= 1 PKGNAME becomes gtkmumble-0.10_1 A new version is released by the vendor, numbered 0.2 (it turns out the author actually intended 0.10 to actually mean 0.1.0, not what comes after 0.9 - oops, too late now). Since the new minor version 2 is numerically less than the previous version 10, the PORTEPOCH must be bumped to manually force the new package to be detected as newer. Since it is a new vendor release of the code, PORTREVISION is reset to 0 (or removed from the Makefile). PORTNAME= gtkmumble PORTVERSION= 0.2 PORTEPOCH= 1 PKGNAME becomes gtkmumble-0.2,1 The next release is 0.3. Since PORTEPOCH never decreases, the version variables are now: PORTNAME= gtkmumble PORTVERSION= 0.3 PORTEPOCH= 1 PKGNAME becomes gtkmumble-0.3,1 If PORTEPOCH were reset to 0 with this upgrade, someone who had installed the gtkmumble-0.10_1 package would not detect the gtkmumble-0.3 package as newer, since 3 is still numerically less than 10. Remember, this is the whole point of PORTEPOCH in the first place. <makevar>PKGNAMEPREFIX</makevar> and <makevar>PKGNAMESUFFIX</makevar> Two optional variables, PKGNAMEPREFIX and PKGNAMESUFFIX, are combined with PORTNAME and PORTVERSION to form PKGNAME as ${PKGNAMEPREFIX}${PORTNAME}${PKGNAMESUFFIX}-${PORTVERSION}. Make sure this conforms to our guidelines for a good package name. In particular, you are not allowed to use a hyphen (-) in PORTVERSION. Also, if the package name has the language- or the -compiled.specifics part (see below), use PKGNAMEPREFIX and PKGNAMESUFFIX, respectively. Do not make them part of PORTNAME. <makevar>LATEST_LINK</makevar> In some cases, several versions of a program may be present in the ports collection at the same time. Both the index build and the package build system need to be able to see them as different, independent ports, although they may all have the same PORTNAME, PKGNAMEPREFIX, and even PKGNAMESUFFIX. In those cases, the optional LATEST_LINK variable should be set to a different value for all ports except the main one — see the editors/vim5 and editors/vim ports, and the www/apache* family for examples of its use. Note that how to choose a main version — most popular, best supported, least patched, and so on — is outside the scope of this handbook's recommendations; we only tell you how to specify the other ports' versions after you have picked a main one. Package Naming Conventions The following are the conventions you should follow in naming your packages. This is to have our package directory easy to scan, as there are already thousands of packages and users are going to turn away if they hurt their eyes! The package name should look like language_region-name-compiled.specifics-version.numbers. The package name is defined as ${PKGNAMEPREFIX}${PORTNAME}${PKGNAMESUFFIX}-${PORTVERSION}. Make sure to set the variables to conform to that format. FreeBSD strives to support the native language of its users. The language- part should be a two letter abbreviation of the natural language defined by ISO-639 if the port is specific to a certain language. Examples are ja for Japanese, ru for Russian, vi for Vietnamese, zh for Chinese, ko for Korean and de for German. If the port is specific to a certain region within the language area, add the two letter country code as well. Examples are en_US for US English and fr_CH for Swiss French. The language- part should be set in the PKGNAMEPREFIX variable. The first letter of the name part should be lowercase. (The rest of the name may contain capital letters, so use your own discretion when you are converting a software name that has some capital letters in it.) There is a tradition of naming Perl 5 modules by prepending p5- and converting the double-colon separator to a hyphen; for example, the Data::Dumper module becomes p5-Data-Dumper. Make sure that the port's name and version are clearly separated and placed into the PORTNAME and PORTVERSION variables. The only reason for PORTNAME to contain a version part is if the upstream distribution is really named that way, as in the textproc/libxml2 or japanese/kinput2-freewnn ports. Otherwise, the PORTNAME should not contain any version-specific information. It is quite normal for several ports to have the same PORTNAME, as the www/apache* ports do; in that case, different versions (and different index entries) are distinguished by the PKGNAMEPREFIX, PKGNAMESUFFIX, and LATEST_LINK values. If the port can be built with different hardcoded defaults (usually part of the directory name in a family of ports), the -compiled.specifics part should state the compiled-in defaults (the hyphen is optional). Examples are papersize and font units. The -compiled.specifics part should be set in the PKGNAMESUFFIX variable. The version string should follow a dash (-) and be a period-separated list of integers and single lowercase alphabetics. In particular, it is not permissible to have another dash inside the version string. The only exception is the string pl (meaning patchlevel), which can be used only when there are no major and minor version numbers in the software. If the software version has strings like alpha, beta, rc, or pre, take the first letter and put it immediately after a period. If the version string continues after those names, the numbers should follow the single alphabet without an extra period between them. The idea is to make it easier to sort ports by looking at the version string. In particular, make sure version number components are always delimited by a period, and if the date is part of the string, use the yyyy.mm.dd format, not dd.mm.yyyy or the non-Y2K compliant yy.mm.dd format. Here are some (real) examples on how to convert the name as called by the software authors to a suitable package name: Distribution Name PKGNAMEPREFIX PORTNAME PKGNAMESUFFIX PORTVERSION Reason mule-2.2.2 (empty) mule (empty) 2.2.2 No changes required EmiClock-1.0.2 (empty) emiclock (empty) 1.0.2 No uppercase names for single programs rdist-1.3alpha (empty) rdist (empty) 1.3.a No strings like alpha allowed es-0.9-beta1 (empty) es (empty) 0.9.b1 No strings like beta allowed mailman-2.0rc3 (empty) mailman (empty) 2.0.r3 No strings like rc allowed v3.3beta021.src (empty) tiff (empty) 3.3 What the heck was that anyway? tvtwm (empty) tvtwm (empty) pl11 Version string always required piewm (empty) piewm (empty) 1.0 Version string always required xvgr-2.10pl1 (empty) xvgr (empty) 2.10.1 pl allowed only when no major/minor version numbers gawk-2.15.6 ja- gawk (empty) 2.15.6 Japanese language version psutils-1.13 (empty) psutils -letter 1.13 Papersize hardcoded at package build time pkfonts (empty) pkfonts 300 1.0 Package for 300dpi fonts If there is absolutely no trace of version information in the original source and it is unlikely that the original author will ever release another version, just set the version string to 1.0 (like the piewm example above). Otherwise, ask the original author or use the date string (yyyy.mm.dd) as the version. Categorization <makevar>CATEGORIES</makevar> When a package is created, it is put under /usr/ports/packages/All and links are made from one or more subdirectories of /usr/ports/packages. The names of these subdirectories are specified by the variable CATEGORIES. It is intended to make life easier for the user when he is wading through the pile of packages on the FTP site or the CDROM. Please take a look at the current list of categories and pick the ones that are suitable for your port. This list also determines where in the ports tree the port is imported. If you put more than one category here, it is assumed that the port files will be put in the subdirectory with the name in the first category. See below for more discussion about how to pick the right categories. Current list of categories Here is the current list of port categories. Those marked with an asterisk (*) are virtual categories—those that do not have a corresponding subdirectory in the ports tree. They are only used as secondary categories, and only for search purposes. For non-virtual categories, you will find a one-line description in the COMMENT in that subdirectory's Makefile. Category Description Notes accessibility Ports to help disabled users. afterstep* Ports to support the AfterStep window manager. arabic Arabic language support. archivers Archiving tools. astro Astronomical ports. audio Sound support. benchmarks Benchmarking utilities. biology Biology-related software. cad Computer aided design tools. chinese Chinese language support. comms Communication software. Mostly software to talk to your serial port. converters Character code converters. databases Databases. deskutils Things that used to be on the desktop before computers were invented. devel Development utilities. Do not put libraries here just because they are libraries—unless they truly do not belong anywhere else, they should not be in this category. dns DNS-related software. docs* Meta-ports for FreeBSD documentation. editors General editors. Specialized editors go in the section for those tools (e.g., a mathematical-formula editor will go in math). elisp* Emacs-lisp ports. emulators Emulators for other operating systems. Terminal emulators do not belong here—X-based ones should go to x11 and text-based ones to either comms or misc, depending on the exact functionality. finance Monetary, financial and related applications. french French language support. ftp FTP client and server utilities. If your port speaks both FTP and HTTP, put it in ftp with a secondary category of www. games Games. geography* Geography-related software. german German language support. gnome* Ports from the GNOME Project. gnustep* Software related to the GNUstep desktop environment. graphics Graphics utilities. hamradio* Software for amateur radio. haskell* Software related to the Haskell language. hebrew Hebrew language support. hungarian Hungarian language support. ipv6* IPv6 related software. irc Internet Relay Chat utilities. japanese Japanese language support. java Software related to the Java™ language. The java category shall not be the only one for a port. Save for ports directly related to the Java language, porters are also encouraged not to use java as the main category of a port. kde* Ports from the K Desktop Environment (KDE) Project. kld* Kernel loadable modules. korean Korean language support. lang Programming languages. linux* Linux applications and support utilities. lisp* Software related to the Lisp language. mail Mail software. math Numerical computation software and other utilities for mathematics. mbone MBone applications. misc Miscellaneous utilities Basically things that do not belong anywhere else. If at all possible, try to find a better category for your port than misc, as ports tend to get overlooked in here. multimedia Multimedia software. net Miscellaneous networking software. net-im Instant messaging software. net-mgmt Networking management software. net-p2p Peer to peer network applications. news USENET news software. palm Software support for the Palm™ series. parallel* Applications dealing with parallelism in computing. pear* Ports related to the Pear PHP framework. perl5* Ports that require Perl version 5 to run. plan9* Various programs from Plan9. polish Polish language support. ports-mgmt Ports for managing, installing and developing FreeBSD ports and packages. portuguese Portuguese language support. print Printing software. Desktop publishing tools (previewers, etc.) belong here too. python* Software related to the Python language. ruby* Software related to the Ruby language. rubygems* Ports of RubyGems packages. russian Russian language support. scheme* Software related to the Scheme language. science Scientific ports that do not fit into other categories such as astro, biology and math. security Security utilities. shells Command line shells. spanish* Spanish language support. sysutils System utilities. tcl* Ports that use Tcl to run. textproc Text processing utilities. It does not include desktop publishing tools, which go to print. tk* Ports that use Tk to run. ukrainian Ukrainian language support. vietnamese Vietnamese language support. windowmaker* Ports to support the WindowMaker window manager. www Software related to the World Wide Web. HTML language support belongs here too. x11 The X Window System and friends. This category is only for software that directly supports the window system. Do not put regular X applications here; most of them should go into other x11-* categories (see below). If your port is an X application, define USE_XLIB (implied by USE_IMAKE) and put it in the appropriate category. x11-clocks X11 clocks. x11-drivers X11 drivers. x11-fm X11 file managers. x11-fonts X11 fonts and font utilities. x11-servers X11 servers. x11-themes X11 themes. x11-toolkits X11 toolkits. x11-wm X11 window managers. xfce* Ports related to the Xfce desktop environment. zope* Zope support. Choosing the right category As many of the categories overlap, you often have to choose which of the categories should be the primary category of your port. There are several rules that govern this issue. Here is the list of priorities, in decreasing order of precedence: The first category must be a physical category (see above). This is necessary to make the packaging work. Virtual categories and physical categories may be intermixed after that. Language specific categories always come first. For example, if your port installs Japanese X11 fonts, then your CATEGORIES line would read japanese x11-fonts. Specific categories are listed before less-specific ones. For instance, an HTML editor should be listed as www editors, not the other way around. Also, you should not list net when the port belongs to any of irc, mail, mbone, news, security, or www, as net is included implicitly. x11 is used as a secondary category only when the primary category is a natural language. In particular, you should not put x11 in the category line for X applications. Emacs modes should be placed in the same ports category as the application supported by the mode, not in editors. For example, an Emacs mode to edit source files of some programming language should go into lang. Ports which install loadable kernel modules should have the virtual category kld in their CATEGORIES line. misc should not appear with any other non-virtual category. If you have misc with something else in your CATEGORIES line, that means you can safely delete misc and just put the port in that other subdirectory! If your port truly does not belong anywhere else, put it in misc. If you are not sure about the category, please put a comment to that effect in your &man.send-pr.1; submission so we can discuss it before we import it. If you are a committer, send a note to the &a.ports; so we can discuss it first. Too often, new ports are imported to the wrong category only to be moved right away. This causes unnecessary and undesirable bloat in the master source repository. Proposing a new category As the Ports Collection has grown over time, various new categories have been introduced. New categories can either be virtual categories—those that do not have a corresponding subdirectory in the ports tree— or physical categories—those that do. The following text discusses the issues involved in creating a new physical category so that you can understand them before you propose one. Our existing practice has been to avoid creating a new physical category unless either a large number of ports would logically belong to it, or the ports that would belong to it are a logically distinct group that is of limited general interest (for instance, categories related to spoken human languages), or preferably both. The rationale for this is that such a change creates a fair amount of work for both the committers and also for all users who track changes to the Ports Collection. In addition, proposed category changes just naturally seem to attract controversy. (Perhaps this is because there is no clear consensus on when a category is too big, nor whether categories should lend themselves to browsing (and thus what number of categories would be an ideal number), and so forth.) Here is the procedure: Propose the new category on &a.ports;. You should include a detailed rationale for the new category, including why you feel the existing categories are not sufficient, and the list of existing ports proposed to move. (If there are new ports pending in GNATS that would fit this category, list them too.) If you are the maintainer and/or submitter, respectively, mention that as it may help you to make your case. Participate in the discussion. If it seems that there is support for your idea, file a PR which includes both the rationale and the list of existing ports that need to be moved. Ideally, this PR should also include patches for the following: Makefiles for the new ports once they are repocopied Makefile for the new category Makefile for the old ports' categories Makefiles for ports that depend on the old ports (for extra credit, you can include the other files that have to change, as per the procedure in the Committer's Guide.) Since it affects the ports infrastructure and involves not only performing repo-copies but also possibly running regression tests on the build cluster, the PR should be assigned to the &a.portmgr;. If that PR is approved, a committer will need to follow the rest of the procedure that is outlined in the Committer's Guide. Proposing a new virtual category should be similar to the above but much less involved, since no ports will actually have to move. In this case, the only patches to include in the PR would be those to add the new category to the CATEGORIES of the affected ports. Proposing reorganizing all the categories Occasionally someone proposes reorganizing the categories with either a 2-level structure, or some other kind of keyword structure. To date, nothing has come of any of these proposals because, while they are very easy to make, the effort involved to retrofit the entire existing ports collection with any kind of reorganization is daunting to say the very least. Please read the history of these proposals in the mailing list archives before you post this idea; furthermore, you should be prepared to be challenged to offer a working prototype. The distribution files The second part of the Makefile describes the files that must be downloaded in order to build the port, and where they can be downloaded from. <makevar>DISTVERSION/DISTNAME</makevar> DISTNAME is the name of the port as called by the authors of the software. DISTNAME defaults to ${PORTNAME}-${PORTVERSION}, so override it only if necessary. DISTNAME is only used in two places. First, the distribution file list (DISTFILES) defaults to ${DISTNAME}${EXTRACT_SUFX}. Second, the distribution file is expected to extract into a subdirectory named WRKSRC, which defaults to work/${DISTNAME}. Some vendor's distribution names which do not fit into the ${PORTNAME}-${PORTVERSION}-scheme can be handled automatically by setting DISTVERSION. PORTVERSION and DISTNAME will be derived automatically, but can of course be overridden. The following table lists some examples: DISTVERSION PORTVERSION 0.7.1d 0.7.1.d 10Alpha3 10.a3 3Beta7-pre2 3.b7.p2 8:f_17 8f.17 PKGNAMEPREFIX and PKGNAMESUFFIX do not affect DISTNAME. Also note that if WRKSRC is equal to work/${PORTNAME}-${PORTVERSION} while the original source archive is named something other than ${PORTNAME}-${PORTVERSION}${EXTRACT_SUFX}, you should probably leave DISTNAME alone— you are better off defining DISTFILES than having to set both DISTNAME and WRKSRC (and possibly EXTRACT_SUFX). <makevar>MASTER_SITES</makevar> Record the directory part of the FTP/HTTP-URL pointing at the original tarball in MASTER_SITES. Do not forget the trailing slash (/)! The make macros will try to use this specification for grabbing the distribution file with FETCH if they cannot find it already on the system. It is recommended that you put multiple sites on this list, preferably from different continents. This will safeguard against wide-area network problems. We are even planning to add support for automatically determining the closest master site and fetching from there; having multiple sites will go a long way towards helping this effort. If the original tarball is part of one of the popular archives such as X-contrib, GNU, or Perl CPAN, you may be able refer to those sites in an easy compact form using MASTER_SITE_* (e.g., MASTER_SITE_XCONTRIB, MASTER_SITE_GNU and MASTER_SITE_PERL_CPAN). Simply set MASTER_SITES to one of these variables and MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR to the path within the archive. Here is an example: MASTER_SITES= ${MASTER_SITE_XCONTRIB} MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR= applications These variables are defined in /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.sites.mk. There are new entries added all the time, so make sure to check the latest version of this file before submitting a port. The user can also set the MASTER_SITE_* variables in /etc/make.conf to override our choices, and use their favorite mirrors of these popular archives instead. <makevar>EXTRACT_SUFX</makevar> If you have one distribution file, and it uses an odd suffix to indicate the compression mechanism, set EXTRACT_SUFX. For example, if the distribution file was named foo.tgz instead of the more normal foo.tar.gz, you would write: DISTNAME= foo EXTRACT_SUFX= .tgz The USE_BZIP2 and USE_ZIP variables automatically set EXTRACT_SUFX to .tar.bz2 or .zip as necessary. If neither of these are set then EXTRACT_SUFX defaults to .tar.gz. You never need to set both EXTRACT_SUFX and DISTFILES. <makevar>DISTFILES</makevar> Sometimes the names of the files to be downloaded have no resemblance to the name of the port. For example, it might be called source.tar.gz or similar. In other cases the application's source code might be in several different archives, all of which must be downloaded. If this is the case, set DISTFILES to be a space separated list of all the files that must be downloaded. DISTFILES= source1.tar.gz source2.tar.gz If not explicitly set, DISTFILES defaults to ${DISTNAME}${EXTRACT_SUFX}. <makevar>EXTRACT_ONLY</makevar> If only some of the DISTFILES must be extracted—for example, one of them is the source code, while another is an uncompressed document—list the filenames that must be extracted in EXTRACT_ONLY. DISTFILES= source.tar.gz manual.html EXTRACT_ONLY= source.tar.gz If none of the DISTFILES should be uncompressed then set EXTRACT_ONLY to the empty string. EXTRACT_ONLY= <makevar>PATCHFILES</makevar> If your port requires some additional patches that are available by FTP or HTTP, set PATCHFILES to the names of the files and PATCH_SITES to the URL of the directory that contains them (the format is the same as MASTER_SITES). If the patch is not relative to the top of the source tree (i.e., WRKSRC) because it contains some extra pathnames, set PATCH_DIST_STRIP accordingly. For instance, if all the pathnames in the patch have an extra foozolix-1.0/ in front of the filenames, then set PATCH_DIST_STRIP=-p1. Do not worry if the patches are compressed; they will be decompressed automatically if the filenames end with .gz or .Z. If the patch is distributed with some other files, such as documentation, in a gzip'd tarball, you cannot just use PATCHFILES. If that is the case, add the name and the location of the patch tarball to DISTFILES and MASTER_SITES. Then, use the EXTRA_PATCHES variable to point to those files and bsd.port.mk will automatically apply them for you. In particular, do not copy patch files into the PATCHDIR directory—that directory may not be writable. The tarball will have been extracted alongside the regular source by then, so there is no need to explicitly extract it if it is a regular gzip'd or compress'd tarball. If you do the latter, take extra care not to overwrite something that already exists in that directory. Also, do not forget to add a command to remove the copied patch in the pre-clean target. Multiple distribution files or patches from different sites and subdirectories (<literal>MASTER_SITES:n</literal>) (Consider this to be a somewhat advanced topic; those new to this document may wish to skip this section at first). This section has information on the fetching mechanism known as both MASTER_SITES:n and MASTER_SITES_NN. We will refer to this mechanism as MASTER_SITES:n hereon. A little background first. OpenBSD has a neat feature inside the DISTFILES and PATCHFILES variables which allows files and patches to be postfixed with :n identifiers. Here, n can be both [0-9] and denote a group designation. For example: DISTFILES= alpha:0 beta:1 In OpenBSD, distribution file alpha will be associated with variable MASTER_SITES0 instead of our common MASTER_SITES and beta with MASTER_SITES1. This is a very interesting feature which can decrease that endless search for the correct download site. Just picture 2 files in DISTFILES and 20 sites in MASTER_SITES, the sites slow as hell where beta is carried by all sites in MASTER_SITES, and alpha can only be found in the 20th site. It would be such a waste to check all of them if the maintainer knew this beforehand, would it not? Not a good start for that lovely weekend! Now that you have the idea, just imagine more DISTFILES and more MASTER_SITES. Surely our distfiles survey meister would appreciate the relief to network strain that this would bring. In the next sections, information will follow on the FreeBSD implementation of this idea. We improved a bit on OpenBSD's concept. Simplified information This section tells you how to quickly prepare fine grained fetching of multiple distribution files and patches from different sites and subdirectories. We describe here a case of simplified MASTER_SITES:n usage. This will be sufficient for most scenarios. However, if you need further information, you will have to refer to the next section. Some applications consist of multiple distribution files that must be downloaded from a number of different sites. For example, Ghostscript consists of the core of the program, and then a large number of driver files that are used depending on the user's printer. Some of these driver files are supplied with the core, but many others must be downloaded from a variety of different sites. To support this, each entry in DISTFILES may be followed by a colon and a tag name. Each site listed in MASTER_SITES is then followed by a colon, and the tag that indicates which distribution files should be downloaded from this site. For example, consider an application with the source split in two parts, source1.tar.gz and source2.tar.gz, which must be downloaded from two different sites. The port's Makefile would include lines like . Simplified use of <literal>MASTER_SITES:n</literal> with 1 file per site MASTER_SITES= ftp://ftp.example1.com/:source1 \ ftp://ftp.example2.com/:source2 DISTFILES= source1.tar.gz:source1 \ source2.tar.gz:source2 Multiple distribution files can have the same tag. Continuing the previous example, suppose that there was a third distfile, source3.tar.gz, that should be downloaded from ftp.example2.com. The Makefile would then be written like . Simplified use of <literal>MASTER_SITES:n</literal> with more than 1 file per site MASTER_SITES= ftp://ftp.example1.com/:source1 \ ftp://ftp.example2.com/:source2 DISTFILES= source1.tar.gz:source1 \ source2.tar.gz:source2 \ source3.tar.gz:source2 Detailed information Okay, so the previous section example did not reflect your needs? In this section we will explain in detail how the fine grained fetching mechanism MASTER_SITES:n works and how you can modify your ports to use it. Elements can be postfixed with :n where n is [^:,]+, i.e., n could conceptually be any alphanumeric string but we will limit it to [a-zA-Z_][0-9a-zA-Z_]+ for now. Moreover, string matching is case sensitive; i.e., n is different from N. However, the following words cannot be used for postfixing purposes since they yield special meaning: default, all and ALL (they are used internally in item ). Furthermore, DEFAULT is a special purpose word (check item ). Elements postfixed with :n belong to the group n, :m belong to group m and so forth. Elements without a postfix are groupless, i.e., they all belong to the special group DEFAULT. If you postfix any elements with DEFAULT, you are just being redundant unless you want to have an element belonging to both DEFAULT and other groups at the same time (check item ). The following examples are equivalent but the first one is preferred: MASTER_SITES= alpha MASTER_SITES= alpha:DEFAULT Groups are not exclusive, an element may belong to several different groups at the same time and a group can either have either several different elements or none at all. Repeated elements within the same group will be simply that, repeated elements. When you want an element to belong to several groups at the same time, you can use the comma operator (,). Instead of repeating it several times, each time with a different postfix, we can list several groups at once in a single postfix. For instance, :m,n,o marks an element that belongs to group m, n and o. All the following examples are equivalent but the last one is preferred: MASTER_SITES= alpha alpha:SOME_SITE MASTER_SITES= alpha:DEFAULT alpha:SOME_SITE MASTER_SITES= alpha:SOME_SITE,DEFAULT MASTER_SITES= alpha:DEFAULT,SOME_SITE All sites within a given group are sorted according to MASTER_SORT_AWK. All groups within MASTER_SITES and PATCH_SITES are sorted as well. Group semantics can be used in any of the following variables MASTER_SITES, PATCH_SITES, MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR, PATCH_SITE_SUBDIR, DISTFILES, and PATCHFILES according to the following syntax: All MASTER_SITES, PATCH_SITES, MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR and PATCH_SITE_SUBDIR elements must be terminated with the forward slash / character. If any elements belong to any groups, the group postfix :n must come right after the terminator /. The MASTER_SITES:n mechanism relies on the existence of the terminator / to avoid confusing elements where a :n is a valid part of the element with occurrences where :n denotes group n. For compatibility purposes, since the / terminator was not required before in both MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR and PATCH_SITE_SUBDIR elements, if the postfix immediate preceding character is not a / then :n will be considered a valid part of the element instead of a group postfix even if an element is postfixed with :n. See both and . Detailed use of <literal>MASTER_SITES:n</literal> in <makevar>MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR</makevar> MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR= old:n new/:NEW Directories within group DEFAULT -> old:n Directories within group NEW -> new Detailed use of <literal>MASTER_SITES:n</literal> with comma operator, multiple files, multiple sites and multiple subdirectories MASTER_SITES= http://site1/%SUBDIR%/ http://site2/:DEFAULT \ http://site3/:group3 http://site4/:group4 \ http://site5/:group5 http://site6/:group6 \ http://site7/:DEFAULT,group6 \ http://site8/%SUBDIR%/:group6,group7 \ http://site9/:group8 DISTFILES= file1 file2:DEFAULT file3:group3 \ file4:group4,group5,group6 file5:grouping \ file6:group7 MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR= directory-trial:1 directory-n/:groupn \ directory-one/:group6,DEFAULT \ directory The previous example results in the following fine grained fetching. Sites are listed in the exact order they will be used. file1 will be fetched from MASTER_SITE_OVERRIDE http://site1/directory-trial:1/ http://site1/directory-one/ http://site1/directory/ http://site2/ http://site7/ MASTER_SITE_BACKUP file2 will be fetched exactly as file1 since they both belong to the same group MASTER_SITE_OVERRIDE http://site1/directory-trial:1/ http://site1/directory-one/ http://site1/directory/ http://site2/ http://site7/ MASTER_SITE_BACKUP file3 will be fetched from MASTER_SITE_OVERRIDE http://site3/ MASTER_SITE_BACKUP file4 will be fetched from MASTER_SITE_OVERRIDE http://site4/ http://site5/ http://site6/ http://site7/ http://site8/directory-one/ MASTER_SITE_BACKUP file5 will be fetched from MASTER_SITE_OVERRIDE MASTER_SITE_BACKUP file6 will be fetched from MASTER_SITE_OVERRIDE http://site8/ MASTER_SITE_BACKUP How do I group one of the special variables from bsd.sites.mk, e.g., MASTER_SITE_SOURCEFORGE? See . Detailed use of <literal>MASTER_SITES:n</literal> with <makevar>MASTER_SITE_SOURCEFORGE</makevar> MASTER_SITES= http://site1/ ${MASTER_SITE_SOURCEFORGE:S/$/:sourceforge,TEST/} DISTFILES= something.tar.gz:sourceforge something.tar.gz will be fetched from all sites within MASTER_SITE_SOURCEFORGE. How do I use this with PATCH* variables? All examples were done with MASTER* variables but they work exactly the same for PATCH* ones as can be seen in . Simplified use of <literal>MASTER_SITES:n</literal> with <makevar>PATCH_SITES</makevar>. PATCH_SITES= http://site1/ http://site2/:test PATCHFILES= patch1:test What does change for ports? What does not? All current ports remain the same. The MASTER_SITES:n feature code is only activated if there are elements postfixed with :n like elements according to the aforementioned syntax rules, especially as shown in item . The port targets remain the same: checksum, makesum, patch, configure, build, etc. With the obvious exceptions of do-fetch, fetch-list, master-sites and patch-sites. do-fetch: deploys the new grouping postfixed DISTFILES and PATCHFILES with their matching group elements within both MASTER_SITES and PATCH_SITES which use matching group elements within both MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR and PATCH_SITE_SUBDIR. Check . fetch-list: works like old fetch-list with the exception that it groups just like do-fetch. master-sites and patch-sites: (incompatible with older versions) only return the elements of group DEFAULT; in fact, they execute targets master-sites-default and patch-sites-default respectively. Furthermore, using target either master-sites-all or patch-sites-all is preferred to directly checking either MASTER_SITES or PATCH_SITES. Also, directly checking is not guaranteed to work in any future versions. Check item for more information on these new port targets. New port targets There are master-sites-n and patch-sites-n targets which will list the elements of the respective group n within MASTER_SITES and PATCH_SITES respectively. For instance, both master-sites-DEFAULT and patch-sites-DEFAULT will return the elements of group DEFAULT, master-sites-test and patch-sites-test of group test, and thereon. There are new targets master-sites-all and patch-sites-all which do the work of the old master-sites and patch-sites ones. They return the elements of all groups as if they all belonged to the same group with the caveat that it lists as many MASTER_SITE_BACKUP and MASTER_SITE_OVERRIDE as there are groups defined within either DISTFILES or PATCHFILES; respectively for master-sites-all and patch-sites-all. <makevar>DIST_SUBDIR</makevar> Do not let your port clutter /usr/ports/distfiles. If your port requires a lot of files to be fetched, or contains a file that has a name that might conflict with other ports (e.g., Makefile), set DIST_SUBDIR to the name of the port (${PORTNAME} or ${PKGNAMEPREFIX}${PORTNAME} should work fine). This will change DISTDIR from the default /usr/ports/distfiles to /usr/ports/distfiles/DIST_SUBDIR, and in effect puts everything that is required for your port into that subdirectory. It will also look at the subdirectory with the same name on the backup master site at ftp.FreeBSD.org. (Setting DISTDIR explicitly in your Makefile will not accomplish this, so please use DIST_SUBDIR.) This does not affect the MASTER_SITES you define in your Makefile. <makevar>ALWAYS_KEEP_DISTFILES</makevar> If your port uses binary distfiles and has a license that requires that the source code is provided with packages distributed in binary form, e.g. GPL, ALWAYS_KEEP_DISTFILES will instruct the &os; build cluster to keep a copy of the files specified in DISTFILES. Users of these ports will generally not need these files, so it is a good idea to only add the source distfiles to DISTFILES when PACKAGE_BUILDING is defined. Use of <makevar>ALWAYS_KEEP_DISTFILES</makevar>. .if defined(PACKAGE_BUILDING) DISTFILES+= foo.tar.gz ALWAYS_KEEP_DISTFILES= yes .endif When adding extra files to DISTFILES, make sure you also add them to distinfo. Also, the additional files will normally be extracted into WRKDIR as well, which for some ports may lead to undesirable sideeffects and require special handling. <makevar>MAINTAINER</makevar> Set your mail-address here. Please. :-) Note that only a single address without the comment part is allowed as a MAINTAINER value. The format used should be user@hostname.domain. Please do not include any descriptive text such as your real name in this entry—that merely confuses bsd.port.mk. The maintainer is responsible for keeping the port up to date, and ensuring the port works correctly. For a detailed description of the responsibilities of a port maintainer, refer to the The challenge for port maintainers section. Changes to the port will be sent to the maintainer of a port for review and approval before being committed. If the maintainer does not respond to an update request after two weeks (excluding major public holidays), then that is considered a maintainer timeout, and the update may be made without explicit maintainer approval. If the maintainer does not respond within three months, then that maintainer is considered absent without leave, and can be replaced as the maintainer of the particular port in question. Exceptions to this are anything maintained by the &a.portmgr;, or the &a.security-officer;. No unauthorized commits may ever be made to ports maintained by those groups. We reserve the right to modify the maintainer's submission to better match existing policies and style of the Ports Collection without explicit blessing from the submitter. Also, large infrastructural changes can result in a port being modified without the maintainer's consent. These kinds of changes will never affect the port's functionality. The &a.portmgr; reserves the right to revoke or override anyone's maintainership for any reason, and the &a.security-officer; reserves the right to revoke or override maintainership for security reasons. <makevar>COMMENT</makevar> This is a one-line description of the port. Please do not include the package name (or version number of the software) in the comment. The comment should begin with a capital and end without a period. Here is an example: COMMENT= A cat chasing a mouse all over the screen The COMMENT variable should immediately follow the MAINTAINER variable in the Makefile. Please try to keep the COMMENT line less than 70 characters, as it is displayed to users as a one-line summary of the port. Dependencies Many ports depend on other ports. There are seven variables that you can use to ensure that all the required bits will be on the user's machine. There are also some pre-supported dependency variables for common cases, plus a few more to control the behavior of dependencies. <makevar>LIB_DEPENDS</makevar> This variable specifies the shared libraries this port depends on. It is a list of lib:dir:target tuples where lib is the name of the shared library, dir is the directory in which to find it in case it is not available, and target is the target to call in that directory. For example, LIB_DEPENDS= jpeg.9:${PORTSDIR}/graphics/jpeg will check for a shared jpeg library with major version 9, and descend into the graphics/jpeg subdirectory of your ports tree to build and install it if it is not found. The target part can be omitted if it is equal to DEPENDS_TARGET (which defaults to install). The lib part is a regular expression which is being looked up in the ldconfig -r output. Values such as intl.[5-7] and intl are allowed. The first pattern, intl.[5-7], will match any of: intl.5, intl.6 or intl.7. The second pattern, intl, will match any version of the intl library. The dependency is checked twice, once from within the extract target and then from within the install target. Also, the name of the dependency is put into the package so that &man.pkg.add.1; will automatically install it if it is not on the user's system. <makevar>RUN_DEPENDS</makevar> This variable specifies executables or files this port depends on during run-time. It is a list of path:dir:target tuples where path is the name of the executable or file, dir is the directory in which to find it in case it is not available, and target is the target to call in that directory. If path starts with a slash (/), it is treated as a file and its existence is tested with test -e; otherwise, it is assumed to be an executable, and which -s is used to determine if the program exists in the search path. For example, RUN_DEPENDS= ${LOCALBASE}/etc/innd:${PORTSDIR}/news/inn \ xmlcatmgr:${PORTSDIR}/textproc/xmlcatmgr will check if the file or directory /usr/local/etc/innd exists, and build and install it from the news/inn subdirectory of the ports tree if it is not found. It will also see if an executable called xmlcatmgr is in the search path, and descend into the textproc/xmlcatmgr subdirectory of your ports tree to build and install it if it is not found. In this case, innd is actually an executable; if an executable is in a place that is not expected to be in the search path, you should use the full pathname. The official search PATH used on the ports build cluster is /sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin The dependency is checked from within the install target. Also, the name of the dependency is put into the package so that &man.pkg.add.1; will automatically install it if it is not on the user's system. The target part can be omitted if it is the same as DEPENDS_TARGET. <makevar>BUILD_DEPENDS</makevar> This variable specifies executables or files this port requires to build. Like RUN_DEPENDS, it is a list of path:dir:target tuples. For example, BUILD_DEPENDS= unzip:${PORTSDIR}/archivers/unzip will check for an executable called unzip, and descend into the archivers/unzip subdirectory of your ports tree to build and install it if it is not found. build here means everything from extraction to compilation. The dependency is checked from within the extract target. The target part can be omitted if it is the same as DEPENDS_TARGET <makevar>FETCH_DEPENDS</makevar> This variable specifies executables or files this port requires to fetch. Like the previous two, it is a list of path:dir:target tuples. For example, FETCH_DEPENDS= ncftp2:${PORTSDIR}/net/ncftp2 will check for an executable called ncftp2, and descend into the net/ncftp2 subdirectory of your ports tree to build and install it if it is not found. The dependency is checked from within the fetch target. The target part can be omitted if it is the same as DEPENDS_TARGET. <makevar>EXTRACT_DEPENDS</makevar> This variable specifies executables or files this port requires for extraction. Like the previous, it is a list of path:dir:target tuples. For example, EXTRACT_DEPENDS= unzip:${PORTSDIR}/archivers/unzip will check for an executable called unzip, and descend into the archivers/unzip subdirectory of your ports tree to build and install it if it is not found. The dependency is checked from within the extract target. The target part can be omitted if it is the same as DEPENDS_TARGET. Use this variable only if the extraction does not already work (the default assumes gzip) and cannot be made to work using USE_ZIP or USE_BZIP2 described in . <makevar>PATCH_DEPENDS</makevar> This variable specifies executables or files this port requires to patch. Like the previous, it is a list of path:dir:target tuples. For example, PATCH_DEPENDS= ${NONEXISTENT}:${PORTSDIR}/java/jfc:extract will descend into the java/jfc subdirectory of your ports tree to extract it. The dependency is checked from within the patch target. The target part can be omitted if it is the same as DEPENDS_TARGET. <makevar>USE_<replaceable>*</replaceable></makevar> A number of variables exist in order to encapsulate common dependencies that many ports have. Although their use is optional, they can help to reduce the verbosity of the port Makefiles. Each of them is styled as USE_*. The usage of these variables is restricted to the port Makefiles and ports/Mk/bsd.*.mk and is not designed to encapsulate user-settable options — use WITH_* and WITHOUT_* for that purpose. It is always incorrect to set any USE_* in /etc/make.conf. For instance, setting USE_GCC=3.4 would add a dependency on gcc34 for every port, including gcc34 itself! The <makevar>USE_<replaceable>*</replaceable></makevar> variables Variable Means USE_BZIP2 The port's tarballs are compressed with bzip2. USE_ZIP The port's tarballs are compressed with zip. USE_BISON The port uses bison for building. USE_CDRTOOLS The port requires cdrecord either from sysutils/cdrtools or sysutils/cdrtools-cjk, according to the user's preference. USE_GCC The port requires a specific version of gcc to build. The exact version can be specified with value such as 3.4. The minimal required version can be specified as 3.4+. The gcc from the base system is used when it satisfies the requested version, otherwise an appropriate gcc is compiled from ports and the CC and CXX variables are adjusted.
Variables related to gmake and the configure script are described in , while autoconf, automake and libtool are described in . Perl related variables are described in . X11 variables are listed in . deals with GNOME and with KDE related variables. documents Java variables, while contains information on Apache, PHP and PEAR modules. Python is discussed in , while Ruby in . provides variables used for SDL applications and finally, contains information on Xfce. Minimal version of a dependency A minimal version of a dependency can be specified in any *_DEPENDS variable except LIB_DEPENDS using the following syntax: p5-Spiffy>=0.26:${PORTSDIR}/devel/p5-Spiffy The first field contains a dependent package name, which must match the entry in the package database, a comparison sign, and a package version. The dependency is satisfied if p5-Spiffy-0.26 or newer is installed on the machine. Notes on dependencies As mentioned above, the default target to call when a dependency is required is DEPENDS_TARGET. It defaults to install. This is a user variable; it is never defined in a port's Makefile. If your port needs a special way to handle a dependency, use the :target part of the *_DEPENDS variables instead of redefining DEPENDS_TARGET. When you type make clean, its dependencies are automatically cleaned too. If you do not wish this to happen, define the variable NOCLEANDEPENDS in your environment. This may be particularly desirable if the port has something that takes a long time to rebuild in its dependency list, such as KDE, GNOME or Mozilla. To depend on another port unconditionally, use the variable ${NONEXISTENT} as the first field of BUILD_DEPENDS or RUN_DEPENDS. Use this only when you need to get the source of the other port. You can often save compilation time by specifying the target too. For instance BUILD_DEPENDS= ${NONEXISTENT}:${PORTSDIR}/graphics/jpeg:extract will always descend to the jpeg port and extract it. Circular dependencies are fatal Do not introduce any circular dependencies into the ports tree! The ports building technology does not tolerate circular dependencies. If you introduce one, you will have someone, somewhere in the world, whose FreeBSD installation will break almost immediately, with many others quickly to follow. These can really be hard to detect; if in doubt, before you make that change, make sure you have done the following: cd /usr/ports; make index. That process can be quite slow on older machines, but you may be able to save a large number of people—including yourself— a lot of grief in the process. <makevar>MASTERDIR</makevar> If your port needs to build slightly different versions of packages by having a variable (for instance, resolution, or paper size) take different values, create one subdirectory per package to make it easier for users to see what to do, but try to share as many files as possible between ports. Typically you only need a very short Makefile in all but one of the directories if you use variables cleverly. In the sole Makefile, you can use MASTERDIR to specify the directory where the rest of the files are. Also, use a variable as part of PKGNAMESUFFIX so the packages will have different names. This will be best demonstrated by an example. This is part of japanese/xdvi300/Makefile; PORTNAME= xdvi PORTVERSION= 17 PKGNAMEPREFIX= ja- PKGNAMESUFFIX= ${RESOLUTION} : # default RESOLUTION?= 300 .if ${RESOLUTION} != 118 && ${RESOLUTION} != 240 && \ ${RESOLUTION} != 300 && ${RESOLUTION} != 400 @${ECHO_MSG} "Error: invalid value for RESOLUTION: \"${RESOLUTION}\"" @${ECHO_MSG} "Possible values are: 118, 240, 300 (default) and 400." @${FALSE} .endif japanese/xdvi300 also has all the regular patches, package files, etc. If you type make there, it will take the default value for the resolution (300) and build the port normally. As for other resolutions, this is the entire xdvi118/Makefile: RESOLUTION= 118 MASTERDIR= ${.CURDIR}/../xdvi300 .include "${MASTERDIR}/Makefile" (xdvi240/Makefile and xdvi400/Makefile are similar). The MASTERDIR definition tells bsd.port.mk that the regular set of subdirectories like FILESDIR and SCRIPTDIR are to be found under xdvi300. The RESOLUTION=118 line will override the RESOLUTION=300 line in xdvi300/Makefile and the port will be built with resolution set to 118. Manpages The MAN[1-9LN] variables will automatically add any manpages to pkg-plist (this means you must not list manpages in the pkg-plist—see generating PLIST for more). It also makes the install stage automatically compress or uncompress manpages depending on the setting of NO_MANCOMPRESS in /etc/make.conf. If your port tries to install multiple names for manpages using symlinks or hardlinks, you must use the MLINKS variable to identify these. The link installed by your port will be destroyed and recreated by bsd.port.mk to make sure it points to the correct file. Any manpages listed in MLINKS must not be listed in the pkg-plist. To specify whether the manpages are compressed upon installation, use the MANCOMPRESSED variable. This variable can take three values, yes, no and maybe. yes means manpages are already installed compressed, no means they are not, and maybe means the software already respects the value of NO_MANCOMPRESS so bsd.port.mk does not have to do anything special. MANCOMPRESSED is automatically set to yes if USE_IMAKE is set and NO_INSTALL_MANPAGES is not set, and to no otherwise. You do not have to explicitly define it unless the default is not suitable for your port. If your port anchors its man tree somewhere other than MANPREFIX, you can use the MANPREFIX to set it. Also, if only manpages in certain sections go in a non-standard place, such as some perl modules ports, you can set individual man paths using MANsectPREFIX (where sect is one of 1-9, L or N). If your manpages go to language-specific subdirectories, set the name of the languages to MANLANG. The value of this variable defaults to "" (i.e., English only). Here is an example that puts it all together. MAN1= foo.1 MAN3= bar.3 MAN4= baz.4 MLINKS= foo.1 alt-name.8 MANLANG= "" ja MAN3PREFIX= ${PREFIX}/share/foobar MANCOMPRESSED= yes This states that six files are installed by this port; ${MANPREFIX}/man/man1/foo.1.gz ${MANPREFIX}/man/ja/man1/foo.1.gz ${PREFIX}/share/foobar/man/man3/bar.3.gz ${PREFIX}/share/foobar/man/ja/man3/bar.3.gz ${MANPREFIX}/man/man4/baz.4.gz ${MANPREFIX}/man/ja/man4/baz.4.gz Additionally ${MANPREFIX}/man/man8/alt-name.8.gz may or may not be installed by your port. Regardless, a symlink will be made to join the foo(1) manpage and alt-name(8) manpage. If only some manpages are translated, you can use several variables dynamically created from MANLANG content: MANLANG= "" de ja MAN1= foo.1 MAN1_EN= bar.1 MAN3_DE= baz.3 This translates into this list of files: ${MANPREFIX}/man/man1/foo.1.gz ${MANPREFIX}/man/de/man1/foo.1.gz ${MANPREFIX}/man/ja/man1/foo.1.gz ${MANPREFIX}/man/man1/bar.1.gz ${MANPREFIX}/man/de/man3/baz.3.gz Info files If your package needs to install GNU info files, they should be listed in the INFO variable (without the trailing .info), one entry per document. These files are assumed to be installed to PREFIX/INFO_PATH. You can change INFO_PATH if your package uses a different location. However, this is not recommended. These entries contain just the path relative to PREFIX/INFO_PATH. For example, lang/gcc34 installs info files to PREFIX/INFO_PATH/gcc34, and INFO will be something like this: INFO= gcc34/cpp gcc34/cppinternals gcc34/g77 ... Appropriate installation/de-installation code will be automatically added to the temporary pkg-plist before package registration. Makefile Options Some large applications can be built in a number of configurations, adding functionality if one of a number of libraries or applications is available. Examples include choice of natural (human) language, GUI versus command-line, or type of database to support. Since not all users want those libraries or applications, the ports system provides hooks that the port author can use to control which configuration should be built. Supporting these properly will make users happy, and effectively provide 2 or more ports for the price of one. Knobs <makevar>WITH_<replaceable>*</replaceable></makevar> and <makevar>WITHOUT_<replaceable>*</replaceable></makevar> These variables are designed to be set by the system administrator. There are many that are standardized in ports/KNOBS file. When creating a port, do not make knob names specific to a given application. For example in Avahi port, use WITHOUT_MDNS instead of WITHOUT_AVAHI_MDNS. You should not assume that a WITH_* necessarily has a corresponding WITHOUT_* variable and vice versa. In general, the default is simply assumed. Unless otherwise specified, these variables are only tested for being set or not set, rather than being set to some kind of variable such as YES or NO. Common <makevar>WITH_<replaceable>*</replaceable></makevar> and <makevar>WITHOUT_<replaceable>*</replaceable></makevar> variables Variable Means WITHOUT_NLS If set, says that internationalization is not needed, which can save compile time. By default, internationalization is used. WITH_OPENSSL_BASE Use the version of OpenSSL in the base system. WITH_OPENSSL_PORT Installs the version of OpenSSL from security/openssl, even if the base is up to date. WITHOUT_X11 If the port can be built both with and without X support, then it should normally be built with X support. If this variable is defined, then the version that does not have X support should be built instead.
Knob naming It is recommended that porters use like-named knobs, for the benefit of end-users and to help keep the number of knob names down. A list of popular knob names can be found in the KNOBS file. Knob names should reflect what the knob is and does. When a port has a lib-prefix in the PORTNAME the lib-prefix should be dropped in knob naming. <makevar>OPTIONS</makevar> Background The OPTIONS variable gives the user who installs the port a dialog with the available options and saves them to /var/db/ports/portname/options. Next time when the port has to be rebuild, the options are reused. Never again you will have to remember all the twenty WITH_* and WITHOUT_* options you used to build this port! When the user runs make config (or runs make build for the first time), the framework will check for /var/db/ports/portname/options. If that file does not exist, it will use the values of OPTIONS to create a dialogbox where the options can be enabled or disabled. Then the options file is saved and the selected variables will be used when building the port. If a new version of the port adds new OPTIONS, the dialog will be presented to the user, with the saved values of old OPTIONS prefilled. Use make showconfig to see the saved configuration. Use make rmconfig to remove the saved configuration. Syntax The syntax for the OPTIONS variable is: OPTIONS= OPTION "descriptive text" default ... The value for default is either ON or OFF. Multiple repetitions of these three fields are allowed. OPTIONS definition must appear before the inclusion of bsd.port.options.mk. The WITH_* and WITHOUT_* variables can only be tested after the inclusion of bsd.port.options.mk. Inclusion of bsd.port.pre.mk can be used instead, too, and is still widely used in ports written before the introduction of bsd.port.options.mk. But be aware that some variables will not work as expected after the inclusion of bsd.port.pre.mk, typically USE_* flags. Simple use of <makevar>OPTIONS</makevar> OPTIONS= FOO "Enable option foo" On \ BAR "Support feature bar" Off .include <bsd.port.options.mk> .if defined(WITHOUT_FOO) CONFIGURE_ARGS+= --without-foo .else CONFIGURE_ARGS+= --with-foo .endif .if defined(WITH_BAR) RUN_DEPENDS+= bar:${PORTSDIR}/bar/bar .endif .include <bsd.port.mk> Old style use of <makevar>OPTIONS</makevar> OPTIONS= FOO "Enable option foo" On .include <bsd.port.pre.mk> .if defined(WITHOUT_FOO) CONFIGURE_ARGS+= --without-foo .else CONFIGURE_ARGS+= --with-foo .endif .include <bsd.port.post.mk> Feature auto-activation When using a GNU configure script, keep an eye on which optional features are activated by auto-detection. Explicitly disable optional features you do not wish to be used by passing respective --without-xxx or --disable-xxx in CONFIGURE_ARGS. Wrong handling of an option .if defined(WITH_FOO) LIB_DEPENDS+= foo.0:${PORTSDIR}/devel/foo CONFIGURE_ARGS+= --enable-foo .endif In the example above, imagine a library libfoo is installed on the system. User does not want this application to use libfoo, so he toggled the option off in the make config dialog. But the application's configure script detects the library present in the system and includes its support in the resulting executable. Now when user decides to remove libfoo from the system, the ports system does not protest (no dependency on libfoo was recorded) but the application breaks. Correct handling of an option .if defined(WITH_FOO) LIB_DEPENDS+= foo.0:${PORTSDIR}/devel/foo CONFIGURE_ARGS+= --enable-foo .else CONFIGURE_ARGS+= --disable-foo .endif In the second example, the library libfoo is explicitly disabled. The configure script does not enable related features in the application, despite library's presence in the system. Specifying the working directory Each port is extracted in to a working directory, which must be writable. The ports system defaults to having the DISTFILES unpack in to a directory called ${DISTNAME}. In other words, if you have set: PORTNAME= foo PORTVERSION= 1.0 then the port's distribution files contain a top-level directory, foo-1.0, and the rest of the files are located under that directory. There are a number of variables you can override if that is not the case. <makevar>WRKSRC</makevar> The variable lists the name of the directory that is created when the application's distfiles are extracted. If our previous example extracted into a directory called foo (and not foo-1.0) you would write: WRKSRC= ${WRKDIR}/foo or possibly WRKSRC= ${WRKDIR}/${PORTNAME} <makevar>NO_WRKSUBDIR</makevar> If the port does not extract in to a subdirectory at all then you should set NO_WRKSUBDIR to indicate that. NO_WRKSUBDIR= yes <makevar>CONFLICTS</makevar> If your package cannot coexist with other packages (because of file conflicts, runtime incompatibility, etc.), list the other package names in the CONFLICTS variable. You can use shell globs like * and ? here. Packages names should be enumerated the same way they appear in /var/db/pkg. Please make sure that CONFLICTS does not match this port's package itself, or else forcing its installation with FORCE_PKG_REGISTER will no longer work. CONFLICTS automatically sets IGNORE, which is more fully documented in . When removing one of several conflicting ports, it is advisable to retain the CONFLICTS entries in those other ports for a few months to cater for users who only update once in a while. Installing files INSTALL_* macros Do use the macros provided in bsd.port.mk to ensure correct modes and ownership of files in your own *-install targets. INSTALL_PROGRAM is a command to install binary executables. INSTALL_SCRIPT is a command to install executable scripts. INSTALL_KLD is a command to install kernel loadable modules. Some architectures don't like it when the modules are stripped, therefor use this command instead of INSTALL_PROGRAM. INSTALL_DATA is a command to install sharable data. INSTALL_MAN is a command to install manpages and other documentation (it does not compress anything). These are basically the install command with all the appropriate flags. Stripping Binaries Do not strip binaries manually unless you have to. All binaries should be stripped, but the INSTALL_PROGRAM macro will install and strip a binary at the same time (see the next section). If you need to strip a file, but do not wish to use the INSTALL_PROGRAM macro, ${STRIP_CMD} will strip your program. This is typically done within the post-install target. For example: post-install: ${STRIP_CMD} ${PREFIX}/bin/xdl Use the &man.file.1; command on the installed executable to check whether the binary is stripped or not. If it does not say not stripped, it is stripped. Additionally, &man.strip.1; will not strip a previously stripped program; it will instead exit cleanly. Installing a whole tree of files Sometimes, there is a need to install a big number of files, preserving their hierarchical organization, ie. copying over a whole directory tree from WRKSRC to a target directory under PREFIX. Two macros exists for this situation. The advantage of using these macros instead of cp is that they guarantee proper file ownership and permissions on target files. The first macro, COPYTREE_BIN, will set all the installed files to be executable, thus being suitable for installing into PREFIX/bin. The second macro, COPYTREE_SHARE, does not set executable permissions on files, and is therefore suitable for installing files under PREFIX/share target. post-install: ${MKDIR} ${EXAMPLESDIR} (cd ${WRKSRC}/examples/ && ${COPYTREE_SHARE} \* ${EXAMPLESDIR}) This example will install the contents of examples directory in the vendor distfile to the proper examples location of your port. post-install: ${MKDIR} ${DATADIR}/summer (cd ${WRKSRC}/temperatures/ && ${COPYTREE_SHARE} "June July August" ${DATADIR}/summer/) And this example will install the data of summer months to the summer subdirectory of a DATADIR. Additional find arguments can be passed via the third argument to the COPYTREE_* macros. For example, to install all files from the first example except Makefiles, one can use the following command. post-install: ${MKDIR} ${EXAMPLESDIR} (cd ${WRKSRC}/examples/ && \ ${COPYTREE_SHARE} \* ${EXAMPLESDIR} "! -name Makefile") Note that these macros does not add the installed files to pkg-plist. You still need to list them. Install additional documentation If your software has some documentation other than the standard man and info pages that you think is useful for the user, install it under PREFIX/share/doc. This can be done, like the previous item, in the post-install target. Create a new directory for your port. The directory name should reflect what the port is. This usually means PORTNAME. However, if you think the user might want different versions of the port to be installed at the same time, you can use the whole PKGNAME. Make the installation dependent on the variable NOPORTDOCS so that users can disable it in /etc/make.conf, like this: post-install: .if !defined(NOPORTDOCS) ${MKDIR} ${DOCSDIR} ${INSTALL_MAN} ${WRKSRC}/docs/xvdocs.ps ${DOCSDIR} .endif Here are some handy variables and how they are expanded by default when used in the Makefile: DATADIR gets expanded to PREFIX/share/PORTNAME. DATADIR_REL gets expanded to share/PORTNAME. DOCSDIR gets expanded to PREFIX/share/doc/PORTNAME. DOCSDIR_REL gets expanded to share/doc/PORTNAME. EXAMPLESDIR gets expanded to PREFIX/share/examples/PORTNAME. EXAMPLESDIR_REL gets expanded to share/examples/PORTNAME. NOPORTDOCS only controls additional documentation installed in DOCSDIR. It does not apply to standard man pages and info pages. Things installed in DATADIR and EXAMPLESDIR are controlled by NOPORTDATA and NOPORTEXAMPLES, respectively. These variables are exported to PLIST_SUB. Their values will appear there as pathnames relative to PREFIX if possible. That is, share/doc/PORTNAME will be substituted for %%DOCSDIR%% in the packing list by default, and so on. (See more on pkg-plist substitution here.) All conditionally installed documentation files and directories should be included in pkg-plist with the %%PORTDOCS%% prefix, for example: %%PORTDOCS%%%%DOCSDIR%%/AUTHORS %%PORTDOCS%%%%DOCSDIR%%/CONTACT %%PORTDOCS%%@dirrm %%DOCSDIR%% As an alternative to enumerating the documentation files in pkg-plist, a port can set the variable PORTDOCS to a list of file names and shell glob patterns to add to the final packing list. The names will be relative to DOCSDIR. Therefore, a port that utilizes PORTDOCS and uses a non-default location for its documentation should set DOCSDIR accordingly. If a directory is listed in PORTDOCS or matched by a glob pattern from this variable, the entire subtree of contained files and directories will be registered in the final packing list. If NOPORTDOCS is defined then files and directories listed in PORTDOCS would not be installed and neither would be added to port packing list. Installing the documentation at PORTDOCS as shown above remains up to the port itself. A typical example of utilizing PORTDOCS looks as follows: PORTDOCS= README.* ChangeLog docs/* The equivalents of PORTDOCS for files installed under DATADIR and EXAMPLESDIR are PORTDATA and PORTEXAMPLES, respectively. You can also use the pkg-message file to display messages upon installation. See the section on using pkg-message for details. The pkg-message file does not need to be added to pkg-plist. Subdirectories under PREFIX Try to let the port put things in the right subdirectories of PREFIX. Some ports lump everything and put it in the subdirectory with the port's name, which is incorrect. Also, many ports put everything except binaries, header files and manual pages in a subdirectory of lib, which does not work well with the BSD paradigm. Many of the files should be moved to one of the following: etc (setup/configuration files), libexec (executables started internally), sbin (executables for superusers/managers), info (documentation for info browser) or share (architecture independent files). See &man.hier.7; for details; the rules governing /usr pretty much apply to /usr/local too. The exception are ports dealing with USENET news. They may use PREFIX/news as a destination for their files. Special considerations There are some more things you have to take into account when you create a port. This section explains the most common of those. Shared Libraries If your port installs one or more shared libraries, define a USE_LDCONFIG make variable, which will instruct a bsd.port.mk to run ${LDCONFIG} -m on the directory where the new library is installed (usually PREFIX/lib) during post-install target to register it into the shared library cache. This variable, when defined, will also facilitate addition of an appropriate @exec /sbin/ldconfig -m and @unexec /sbin/ldconfig -R pair into your pkg-plist file, so that a user who installed the package can start using the shared library immediately and de-installation will not cause the system to still believe the library is there. USE_LDCONFIG= yes If you need, you can override the default directory by setting the USE_LDCONFIG value to a list of directories into which shared libraries are to be installed. For example if your port installs shared libraries into PREFIX/lib/foo and PREFIX/lib/bar directories you could use the following in your Makefile: USE_LDCONFIG= ${PREFIX}/lib/foo ${PREFIX}/lib/bar Please double-check, often this is not necessary at all or can be avoided through -rpath or setting LD_RUN_PATH during linking (see lang/moscow_ml for an example), or through a shell-wrapper which sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH before invoking the binary, like www/mozilla does. When installing 32-bit libraries on 64-bit system, use USE_LDCONFIG32 instead. Try to keep shared library version numbers in the libfoo.so.0 format. Our runtime linker only cares for the major (first) number. When the major library version number increments in the update to the new port version, all other ports that link to the affected library should have their PORTREVISION incremented, to force recompilation with the new library version. Ports with distribution restrictions Licenses vary, and some of them place restrictions on how the application can be packaged, whether it can be sold for profit, and so on. It is your responsibility as a porter to read the licensing terms of the software and make sure that the FreeBSD project will not be held accountable for violating them by redistributing the source or compiled binaries either via FTP/HTTP or CD-ROM. If in doubt, please contact the &a.ports;. In situations like this, the variables described in the following sections can be set. <makevar>NO_PACKAGE</makevar> This variable indicates that we may not generate a binary package of the application. For instance, the license may disallow binary redistribution, or it may prohibit distribution of packages created from patched sources. However, the port's DISTFILES may be freely mirrored on FTP/HTTP. They may also be distributed on a CD-ROM (or similar media) unless NO_CDROM is set as well. NO_PACKAGE should also be used if the binary package is not generally useful, and the application should always be compiled from the source code. For example, if the application has configuration information that is site specific hard coded in to it at compile time, set NO_PACKAGE. NO_PACKAGE should be set to a string describing the reason why the package should not be generated. <makevar>NO_CDROM</makevar> This variable alone indicates that, although we are allowed to generate binary packages, we may put neither those packages nor the port's DISTFILES onto a CD-ROM (or similar media) for resale. However, the binary packages and the port's DISTFILES will still be available via FTP/HTTP. If this variable is set along with NO_PACKAGE, then only the port's DISTFILES will be available, and only via FTP/HTTP. NO_CDROM should be set to a string describing the reason why the port cannot be redistributed on CD-ROM. For instance, this should be used if the port's license is for non-commercial use only. <makevar>NOFETCHFILES</makevar> Files defined in the NOFETCHFILES variable are not fetchable from any of the MASTER_SITES. An example of such a file is when the file is supplied on CD-ROM by the vendor. Tools which check for the availability of these files on the MASTER_SITES should ignore these files and not report about them. <makevar>RESTRICTED</makevar> Set this variable alone if the application's license permits neither mirroring the application's DISTFILES nor distributing the binary package in any way. NO_CDROM or NO_PACKAGE should not be set along with RESTRICTED since the latter variable implies the former ones. RESTRICTED should be set to a string describing the reason why the port cannot be redistributed. Typically, this indicates that the port contains proprietary software and that the user will need to manually download the DISTFILES, possibly after registering for the software or agreeing to accept the terms of an EULA. <makevar>RESTRICTED_FILES</makevar> When RESTRICTED or NO_CDROM is set, this variable defaults to ${DISTFILES} ${PATCHFILES}, otherwise it is empty. If only some of the distribution files are restricted, then set this variable to list them. Note that the port committer should add an entry to /usr/ports/LEGAL for every listed distribution file, describing exactly what the restriction entails. Building mechanisms Parallel ports building The &os; ports framework supports parallel building using multiple make sub-processes, which allows SMP systems to utilize all of their available CPU power, allowing port builds to be faster and more effective. This is achieved by passing -jX flag to &man.make.1; running on vendor code. Unfortunately, not all ports handle parallel building well. Therefore it is required to explicitly enable this feature by adding MAKE_JOBS_SAFE=yes somewhere below the dependency declaration section of the Makefile. Another option for controlling this feature from the maintainer's point of view is the MAKE_JOBS_UNSAFE=yes variable. It is used when a port is known to be broken with -jX and a user forces the use of multi processor compilations for all ports in /etc/make.conf with the FORCE_MAKE_JOBS=yes variable. <command>make</command>, <command>gmake</command>, and <command>imake</command> If your port uses GNU make, set USE_GMAKE=yes. Variables for ports related to gmake Variable Means USE_GMAKE The port requires gmake to build. GMAKE The full path for gmake if it is not in the PATH.
If your port is an X application that creates Makefile files from Imakefile files using imake, then set USE_IMAKE=yes. This will cause the configure stage to automatically do an xmkmf -a. If the flag is a problem for your port, set XMKMF=xmkmf. If the port uses imake but does not understand the install.man target, NO_INSTALL_MANPAGES=yes should be set. If your port's source Makefile has something else than all as the main build target, set ALL_TARGET accordingly. Same goes for install and INSTALL_TARGET. <command>configure</command> script If your port uses the configure script to generate Makefile files from Makefile.in files, set GNU_CONFIGURE=yes. If you want to give extra arguments to the configure script (the default argument is --prefix=${PREFIX} --infodir=${PREFIX}/${INFO_PATH} --mandir=${MANPREFIX}/man --build=${CONFIGURE_TARGET}), set those extra arguments in CONFIGURE_ARGS. Extra environment variables can be passed using CONFIGURE_ENV variable. Variables for ports that use configure Variable Means GNU_CONFIGURE The port uses configure script to prepare build. HAS_CONFIGURE Same as GNU_CONFIGURE, except default configure target is not added to CONFIGURE_ARGS. CONFIGURE_ARGS Additional arguments passed to configure script. CONFIGURE_ENV Additional environment variables to be set for configure script run. CONFIGURE_TARGET Override default configure target. Default value is ${MACHINE_ARCH}-portbld-freebsd${OSREL}.
Using <command>scons</command> If your port uses SCons, define USE_SCONS=yes. Variables for ports that use <command>scons</command> Variable Means SCONS_ARGS Port specific SCons flags passed to the SCons environment. SCONS_BUILDENV Variables to be set in system environment. SCONS_ENV Variables to be set in SCons environment. SCONS_TARGET Last argument passed to SCons, similar to MAKE_TARGET.
To make third party SConstruct respect everything that is passed to SCons in SCONS_ENV (that is, most importantly, CC/CXX/CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS), patch the SConstruct so build Environment is constructed like this: env = Environment(**ARGUMENTS) It may be then modified with env.Append and env.Replace. Using GNU autotools Introduction The various GNU autotools provide an abstraction mechanism for building a piece of software over a wide variety of operating systems and machine architectures. Within the Ports Collection, an individual port can make use of these tools via a simple construct: USE_AUTOTOOLS= tool:version[:operation] ... At the time of writing, tool can be one of libtool, libltdl, autoconf, autoheader, automake or aclocal. version specifies the particular tool revision to be used (see devel/{automake,autoconf,libtool}[0-9]+ for valid versions). operation is an optional extension to modify how the tool is used. Multiple tools can be specified at once, either by including them all on a single line, or using the += Makefile construct. Finally, there is the special tool, called autotools, which is a convenience function to bring in all available versions of the autotools to allow for cross-development work. This can also be accomplished by installing the devel/autotools port. <command>libtool</command> Shared libraries using the GNU building framework usually use libtool to adjust the compilation and installation of shared libraries to match the specifics of the underlying operating system. The usual practice is to use copy of libtool bundled with the application. In case you need to use external libtool, you can use the version provided by The Ports Collection: USE_AUTOTOOLS= libtool:version[:env] With no additional operations, libtool:version tells the building framework to patch the configure script with the system-installed copy of libtool. The GNU_CONFIGURE is implied. Further, a number of make and shell variables will be assigned for onward use by the port. See bsd.autotools.mk for details. With the :env operation, only the environment will be set up. Finally, LIBTOOLFLAGS and LIBTOOLFILES can be optionally set to override the most likely arguments to, and files patched by, libtool. Most ports are unlikely to need this. See bsd.autotools.mk for further details. <command>libltdl</command> Some ports make use of the libltdl library package, which is part of the libtool suite. Use of this library does not automatically necessitate the use of libtool itself, so a separate construct is provided. USE_AUTOTOOLS= libltdl:version Currently, all this does is to bring in a LIB_DEPENDS on the appropriate libltdl port, and is provided as a convenience function to help eliminate any dependencies on the autotools ports outside of the USE_AUTOTOOLS framework. There are no optional operations for this tool. <command>autoconf</command> and <command>autoheader</command> Some ports do not contain a configure script, but do contain an autoconf template in the configure.ac file. You can use the following assignments to let autoconf create the configure script, and also have autoheader create template headers for use by the configure script. USE_AUTOTOOLS= autoconf:version[:env] and USE_AUTOTOOLS= autoheader:version which also implies the use of autoconf:version. Similarly to libtool, the inclusion of the optional :env operation simply sets up the environment for further use. Without it, patching and reconfiguration of the port is carried out. The additional optional variables AUTOCONF_ARGS and AUTOHEADER_ARGS can be overridden by the port Makefile if specifically requested. As with the libtool equivalents, most ports are unlikely to need this. <command>automake</command> and <command>aclocal</command> Some packages only contain Makefile.am files. These have to be converted into Makefile.in files using automake, and the further processed by configure to generate an actual Makefile. Similarly, packages occasionally do not ship with included aclocal.m4 files, again required to build the software. This can be achieved with aclocal, which scans configure.ac or configure.in. aclocal has a similar relationship to automake as autoheader does to autoconf, described in the previous section. aclocal implies the use of automake, thus we have: USE_AUTOTOOLS= automake:version[:env] and USE_AUTOTOOLS= aclocal:version which also implies the use of automake:version. Similarly to libtool and autoconf, the inclusion of the optional :env operation simply sets up the environment for further use. Without it, reconfiguration of the port is carried out. As with autoconf and autoheader, both automake and aclocal have optional argument variables, AUTOMAKE_ARGS and ACLOCAL_ARGS respectively, which may be overriden by the port Makefile if required. Using GNU <literal>gettext</literal> Basic usage If your port requires gettext, just set USE_GETTEXT to yes, and your port will grow the dependency on devel/gettext. The value of USE_GETTEXT can also specify the required version of the libintl library, the basic part of gettext, but using this feature is strongly discouraged: Your port should work with just the current version of devel/gettext. A rather common case is a port using gettext and configure. Generally, GNU configure should be able to locate gettext automatically. If it ever fails to, hints at the location of gettext can be passed in CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS as follows: USE_GETTEXT= yes CPPFLAGS+= -I${LOCALBASE}/include LDFLAGS+= -L${LOCALBASE}/lib GNU_CONFIGURE= yes CONFIGURE_ENV= CPPFLAGS="${CPPFLAGS}" \ LDFLAGS="${LDFLAGS}" Of course, the code can be more compact if there are no more flags to pass to configure: USE_GETTEXT= yes GNU_CONFIGURE= yes CONFIGURE_ENV= CPPFLAGS="-I${LOCALBASE}/include" \ LDFLAGS="-L${LOCALBASE}/lib" Optional usage Some software products allow for disabling NLS, e.g., through passing to configure. In that case, your port should use gettext conditionally, depending on the status of WITHOUT_NLS. For ports of low to medium complexity, you can rely on the following idiom: GNU_CONFIGURE= yes .if !defined(WITHOUT_NLS) USE_GETTEXT= yes PLIST_SUB+= NLS="" .else CONFIGURE_ARGS+= --disable-nls PLIST_SUB+= NLS="@comment " .endif The next item on your to-do list is to arrange so that the message catalog files are included in the packing list conditionally. The Makefile part of this task is already provided by the idiom. It is explained in the section on advanced pkg-plist practices. In a nutshell, each occurrence of %%NLS%% in pkg-plist will be replaced by @comment  if NLS is disabled, or by a null string if NLS is enabled. Consequently, the lines prefixed by %%NLS%% will become mere comments in the final packing list if NLS is off; otherwise the prefix will be just left out. All you need to do now is insert %%NLS%% before each path to a message catalog file in pkg-plist. For example: %%NLS%%share/locale/fr/LC_MESSAGES/foobar.mo %%NLS%%share/locale/no/LC_MESSAGES/foobar.mo In high complexity cases, you may need to use more advanced techniques than the recipe given here, such as dynamic packing list generation. Handling message catalog directories There is a point to note about installing message catalog files. The target directories for them, which reside under LOCALBASE/share/locale, should rarely be created and removed by your port. The most popular languages have their respective directories listed in /etc/mtree/BSD.local.dist; that is, they are a part of the base system. The directories for many other languages are governed by the devel/gettext port. You may want to consult its pkg-plist and see whether your port is going to install a message catalog file for a unique language. Using <literal>perl</literal> If MASTER_SITES is set to MASTER_SITE_PERL_CPAN, then preferred value of MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR is top-level hierarchy name. For example, the recommend value for p5-Module-Name is Module. The top-level hierarchy can be examined at cpan.org. This keeps the port working when the author of the module changes. The exception to this rule is when the relevant directory does not exist or the distfile does not exist in the directory. In such case, using author's id as MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR is allowed. All of the tunable knobs below accept both YES and a version string, like 5.8.0+. Using YES means that the port can be used with all of the supported Perl versions. If a port only works with specific versions of Perl, it can be indicated with a version string, specifying a minimal version (e.g. 5.7.3+), a maximal version (e.g. 5.8.0-) or an exact version (e.g. 5.8.3). Variables for ports that use <literal>perl</literal> Variable Means USE_PERL5 Says that the port uses perl 5 to build and run. USE_PERL5_BUILD Says that the port uses perl 5 to build. USE_PERL5_RUN Says that the port uses perl 5 to run. PERL The full path of perl 5, either in the system or installed from a port, but without the version number. Use this if you need to replace #!lines in scripts. PERL_CONFIGURE Configure using Perl's MakeMaker. It implies USE_PERL5. PERL_MODBUILD Configure, build and install using Module::Build. It implies PERL_CONFIGURE. Read only variables PERL_VERSION The full version of perl installed (e.g., 5.8.9). PERL_LEVEL The installed perl version as an integer of the form MNNNPP (e.g., 500809). PERL_ARCH Where perl stores architecture dependent libraries. Defaults to ${ARCH}-freebsd. PERL_PORT Name of the perl port that is installed (e.g., perl5). SITE_PERL Directory name where site specific perl packages go. This value is added to PLIST_SUB.
Ports of Perl modules, which do not have an official website, should link cpan.org in the WWW line of a pkg-descr file. The preferred URL form is http://search.cpan.org/dist/Module-Name/ (including the trailing slash). Using X11 X.Org components The X11 implementation available in The Ports Collection is X.Org. If your application depends on X components, set USE_XORG to the list of required components. Available components, at the time of writing, are: bigreqsproto compositeproto damageproto dmx dmxproto evieproto fixesproto fontcacheproto fontenc fontsproto fontutil glproto ice inputproto kbproto libfs oldx printproto randrproto recordproto renderproto resourceproto scrnsaverproto sm trapproto videoproto x11 xau xaw xaw6 xaw7 xaw8 xbitmaps xcmiscproto xcomposite xcursor xdamage xdmcp xevie xext xextproto xf86bigfontproto xf86dgaproto xf86driproto xf86miscproto xf86rushproto xf86vidmodeproto xfixes xfont xfontcache xft xi xinerama xineramaproto xkbfile xkbui xmu xmuu xorg-server xp xpm xprintapputil xprintutil xpr oto xproxymngproto xrandr xrender xres xscrnsaver xt xtrans xtrap xtst xv xvmc xxf86dga xxf86misc xxf86vm. Always up-to-date list can be found in /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.xorg.mk. The Mesa Project is an effort to provide free OpenGL implementation. You can specify a dependency on various components of this project with USE_GL variable. Valid options are: glut, glu, glw, gl and linux. For backwards compatibility, the value of yes maps to glu. USE_XORG example USE_XORG= xrender xft xkbfile xt xaw USE_GL= glu Many ports define USE_XLIB, which makes the port depend on all the 50 or so libraries. This variable exists for backwards compatibility, as it predates modular X.Org, and should not be used on new ports. Variables for ports that use X USE_XLIB The port uses the X libraries. Deprecated - use a list of X.Org components in USE_XORG variable instead. USE_IMAKE The port uses imake. USE_X_PREFIX Deprecated. Today it is equivalent to USE_XLIB and can be replaced by it freely. XMKMF Set to the path of xmkmf if not in the PATH. Defaults to xmkmf -a.
Variables for depending on individual parts of X11 X_IMAKE_PORT Port providing imake and several other utilities used to build X11. X_LIBRARIES_PORT Port providing X11 libraries. X_CLIENTS_PORT Port providing X clients. X_SERVER_PORT Port providing X server. X_FONTSERVER_PORT Port providing font server. X_PRINTSERVER_PORT Port providing print server. X_VFBSERVER_PORT Port providing virtual framebuffer server. X_NESTSERVER_PORT Port providing a nested X server. X_FONTS_ENCODINGS_PORT Port providing encodings for fonts. X_FONTS_MISC_PORT Port providing miscellaneous bitmap fonts. X_FONTS_100DPI_PORT Port providing 100dpi bitmap fonts. X_FONTS_75DPI_PORT Port providing 75dpi bitmap fonts. X_FONTS_CYRILLIC_PORT Port providing cyrillic bitmap fonts. X_FONTS_TTF_PORT Port providing &truetype; fonts. X_FONTS_TYPE1_PORT Port providing Type1 fonts. X_MANUALS_PORT Port providing developer oriented manual pages
Using X11 related variables in port # Use some X11 libraries and depend on # font server as well as cyrillic fonts. RUN_DEPENDS= ${LOCALBASE}/bin/xfs:${X_FONTSERVER_PORT} \ ${LOCALBASE}/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic/crox1c.pcf.gz:${X_FONTS_CYRILLIC_PORT} USE_XORG= x11 xpm Ports that require Motif If your port requires a Motif library, define USE_MOTIF in the Makefile. Default Motif implementation is x11-toolkits/open-motif. Users can choose x11-toolkits/lesstif instead by setting WANT_LESSTIF variable. The MOTIFLIB variable will be set by bsd.port.mk to reference the appropriate Motif library. Please patch the source of your port to use ${MOTIFLIB} wherever the Motif library is referenced in the original Makefile or Imakefile. There are two common cases: If the port refers to the Motif library as -lXm in its Makefile or Imakefile, simply substitute ${MOTIFLIB} for it. If the port uses XmClientLibs in its Imakefile, change it to ${MOTIFLIB} ${XTOOLLIB} ${XLIB}. Note that MOTIFLIB (usually) expands to -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lXm or /usr/X11R6/lib/libXm.a, so there is no need to add -L or -l in front. X11 fonts If your port installs fonts for the X Window System, put them in LOCALBASE/lib/X11/fonts/local. Getting fake <envar>DISPLAY</envar> using Xvfb Some applications require a working X11 display for compilation to succeed. This pose a problem for machines that operate headless. When the following variable is used, the build infrastructure will start the virtual framebuffer X server. The working DISPLAY is then passed to the build. USE_DISPLAY= yes Desktop entries Desktop Entries (Freedesktop standard) can be easily created in your port using DESKTOP_ENTRIES variable. These entries do show up in application menus of compliant desktop environments like GNOME or KDE. The .desktop file will be created, installed, and added to the pkg-plist automatically. Syntax is: DESKTOP_ENTRIES= "NAME" "COMMENT" "ICON" "COMMAND" "CATEGORY" StartupNotify The list of possible categories is available on the Freedesktop website. The StartupNotify indicates, if the application will clear the status in startup notification aware environment. Example: DESKTOP_ENTRIES= "ToME" "Roguelike game based on JRR Tolkien's work" \ "${DATADIR}/xtra/graf/tome-128.png" \ "tome -v -g" "Application;Game;RolePlaying" \ false Using GNOME The FreeBSD/GNOME project uses its own set of variables to define which GNOME components a particular port uses. A comprehensive list of these variables exists within the FreeBSD/GNOME project's homepage. Using Qt Ports that require Qt Variables for ports that use Qt USE_QT_VER The port uses the Qt toolkit. Possible values are 3 and 4; each specify the major version of Qt to use. Appropriate parameters are passed to configure script and make. QT_PREFIX Set to the path where Qt installed to (read-only variable). MOC Set to the path of moc (read-only variable). Default set according to USE_QT_VER value. QTCPPFLAGS Additional compiler flags passed via CONFIGURE_ENV for Qt toolkit. Default set according to USE_QT_VER. QTCFGLIBS Additional libraries for linking passed via CONFIGURE_ENV for Qt toolkit. Default set according to USE_QT_VER. QTNONSTANDARD Suppress modification of CONFIGURE_ENV, CONFIGURE_ARGS, and MAKE_ENV.
Additional variables for ports that use Qt 4.x QT_COMPONENTS Specify tool and library dependencies for Qt4. See below for details. UIC Set to the path of uic (read-only variable). Default set according to USE_QT_VER value. QMAKE Set to the path of qmake (read-only variable). Default set according to USE_QT_VER value. QMAKESPEC Set to the path of configuration file for qmake (read-only variable). Default set according to USE_QT_VER value.
When USE_QT_VER is set, some useful settings are passed to configure script: CONFIGURE_ARGS+= --with-qt-includes=${QT_PREFIX}/include \ --with-qt-libraries=${QT_PREFIX}/lib \ --with-extra-libs=${LOCALBASE}/lib \ --with-extra-includes=${LOCALBASE}/include CONFIGURE_ENV+= MOC="${MOC}" CPPFLAGS="${CPPFLAGS} ${QTCPPFLAGS}" LIBS="${QTCFGLIBS}" \ QTDIR="${QT_PREFIX}" KDEDIR="${KDE_PREFIX}" If USE_QT_VER is set to 4, the following settings are also deployed: CONFIGURE_ENV+= UIC="${UIC}" QMAKE="${QMAKE}" QMAKESPEC="${QMAKESPEC}" MAKE_ENV+= QMAKESPEC="${QMAKESPEC}" Component selection (Qt 4.x only) When USE_QT_VER is set to 4, individual Qt4 tool and library dependencies can be specified in the QT_COMPONENTS variable. Every component can be suffixed by either _build or _run, the suffix indicating whether the component should be depended on at buildtime or runtime, respectively. If unsuffixed, the component will be depended on at both build- and runtime. Usually, library components should be specified unsuffixed, tool components should be specified with the _build suffix and plugin components should be specified with the _run suffix. The most commonly used components are listed below (all available components are listed in _QT_COMPONENTS_ALL in /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.qt.mk): Available Qt4 library components Name Description corelib core library (can be omitted unless the port uses nothing but corelib) gui graphical user interface library network network library opengl OpenGL library qt3support Qt3 compatibility library qtestlib unit testing library script script library sql SQL library xml XML library
You can determine which libraries the application depends on, by running ldd on the main executable after a successful compilation. Available Qt4 tool components Name Description moc meta object compiler (needed for almost every Qt application at buildtime) qmake Makefile generator / build utility rcc resource compiler (need if the application comes with *.rc or *.qrc files) uic user interface compiler (needed if the application comes with *.ui files created by Qt Designer - in practice, every Qt application with a GUI)
Available Qt4 plugin components Name Description iconengines SVG icon engine plugin (if the application ships SVG icons) imageformats imageformat plugins for GIF, JPEG, MNG and SVG (if the application ships image files)
Selecting Qt4 components In this example, the ported application uses the Qt4 graphical user interface library, the Qt4 core library, all of the Qt4 code generation tools and Qt4's Makefile generator. Since the gui library implies a dependency on the core library, corelib does not need to be specified. The Qt4 code generation tools moc, uic and rcc, as well as the Makefile generator qmake are only needed at buildtime, thus they are specified with the _build suffix: USE_QT_VER= 4 QT_COMPONENTS= gui moc_build qmake_build rcc_build uic_build Additional considerations If the application does not provide a configure file but a .pro file, you can use the following: HAS_CONFIGURE= yes do-configure: @cd ${WRKSRC} && ${SETENV} ${CONFIGURE_ENV} \ ${QMAKE} -unix PREFIX=${PREFIX} texmaker.pro Note the similarity to the qmake line from the provided BUILD.sh script. Passing CONFIGURE_ENV ensures qmake will see the QMAKESPEC variable, without which it cannot work. qmake generates standard Makefiles, so it is not necessary to write our own build target. Qt applications often are written to be cross-platform and often X11/Unix isn't the platform they are developed on, which in turn often leads to certain loose ends, like: Missing additional includepaths. Many applications come with system tray icon support, but neglect to look for includes and/or libraries in the X11 directories. You can tell qmake to add directories to the include and library searchpaths via the commandline, for example: ${QMAKE} -unix PREFIX=${PREFIX} INCLUDEPATH+=${LOCALBASE}/include \ LIBS+=-L${LOCALBASE}/lib sillyapp.pro Bogus installation paths. Sometimes data such as icons or .desktop files are by default installed into directories which aren't scanned by XDG-compatible applications. editors/texmaker is an example for this - look at patch-texmaker.pro in the files directory of that port for a template on how to remedy this directly in the Qmake project file. Using KDE Variable definitions (KDE 3.x only) Variables for ports that use KDE 3.x USE_KDELIBS_VER The port uses KDE libraries. It specifies the major version of KDE to use and implies USE_QT_VER of the appropriate version. The only possible value is 3. USE_KDEBASE_VER The port uses KDE base. It specifies the major version of KDE to use and implies USE_QT_VER of the appropriate version. The only possible value is 3.
KDE 4 variable definitions If your application depends on KDE 4.x, set USE_KDE4 to the list of required components. The most commonly used components are listed below (up-to-date components are listed in _USE_KDE4_ALL in /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.kde4.mk): Available KDE4 components Name Description akonadi Personal information management (PIM) storage service automoc4 Makes port use automoc4 build tool kdebase Basic KDE applications (Konqueror, Dolphin, Konsole) kdeexp Experimental KDE libraries (with non-stable API) kdehier Provides common KDE directories kdelibs The base set of KDE libraries kdeprefix If set, port will be installed into ${KDE4_PREFIX} instead of ${LOCALBASE} pimlibs PIM libraries workspace Applications and libraries which form desktop (Plasma, KWin)
KDE 4.x ports are installed into ${KDE4_PREFIX}, which is /usr/local/kde4 currently, to avoid conflicts with KDE 3.x ports. This is achieved by specifying the kdeprefix component, which overrides the default PREFIX. The ports however respect any PREFIX set via MAKEFLAGS environment variable and/or make arguments. KDE 4.x ports may conflict with KDE 3.x ports, so when the kdeprefix component is enabled, they are installed in ${KDE4_PREFIX}. The default value of KDE4_PREFIX is currently /usr/local/kde4. Installing the KDE 4.x ports into a custom PREFIX is also possible. When PREFIX is set via the MAKEFLAGS environment variable or via make options it overrides the value configured by kdeprefix. <makevar>USE_KDE4</makevar> example This is a simple example for KDE 4 port. USE_CMAKE instructs port to utilize CMake — configuration tool widely spread among KDE 4 projects. USE_KDE4 brings dependency on KDE libraries and makes port using automoc4 at build stage. Required KDE components and other dependencies can be determined through configure log. USE_KDE4 does not imply USE_QT_VER. If port requires some of Qt4 components, USE_QT_VER should be set and then needed components can be specified. USE_CMAKE= yes USE_KDE4= automoc4 kdelibs kdeprefix USE_QT_VER= 4 QT_COMPONENTS= qmake_build moc_build rcc_build uic_build Using Java Variable definitions If your port needs a Java™ Development Kit (JDK™) to either build, run or even extract the distfile, then it should define USE_JAVA. There are several JDKs in the ports collection, from various vendors, and in several versions. If your port must use one of these versions, you can define which one. The most current version is java/jdk16. Variables that may be set by ports that use Java Variable Means USE_JAVA Should be defined for the remaining variables to have any effect. JAVA_VERSION List of space-separated suitable Java versions for the port. An optional "+" allows you to specify a range of versions (allowed values: 1.1[+] 1.2[+] 1.3[+] 1.4[+]). JAVA_OS List of space-separated suitable JDK port operating systems for the port (allowed values: native linux). JAVA_VENDOR List of space-separated suitable JDK port vendors for the port (allowed values: freebsd bsdjava sun ibm blackdown). JAVA_BUILD When set, it means that the selected JDK port should be added to the build dependencies of the port. JAVA_RUN When set, it means that the selected JDK port should be added to the run dependencies of the port. JAVA_EXTRACT When set, it means that the selected JDK port should be added to the extract dependencies of the port. USE_JIKES Whether the port should or should not use the jikes bytecode compiler to build. When no value is set for this variable, the port will use jikes to build if available. You may also explicitly forbid or enforce the use of jikes (by setting 'no' or 'yes'). In the later case, devel/jikes will be added to build dependencies of the port. In any case that jikes is actually used in place of javac, then the HAVE_JIKES variable is defined by bsd.java.mk.
Below is the list of all settings a port will receive after setting USE_JAVA: Variables provided to ports that use Java Variable Value JAVA_PORT The name of the JDK port (e.g. 'java/jdk14'). JAVA_PORT_VERSION The full version of the JDK port (e.g. '1.4.2'). If you only need the first two digits of this version number, use ${JAVA_PORT_VERSION:C/^([0-9])\.([0-9])(.*)$/\1.\2/}. JAVA_PORT_OS The operating system used by the JDK port (e.g. 'linux'). JAVA_PORT_VENDOR The vendor of the JDK port (e.g. 'sun'). JAVA_PORT_OS_DESCRIPTION Description of the operating system used by the JDK port (e.g. 'Linux'). JAVA_PORT_VENDOR_DESCRIPTION Description of the vendor of the JDK port (e.g. 'FreeBSD Foundation'). JAVA_HOME Path to the installation directory of the JDK (e.g. '/usr/local/jdk1.3.1'). JAVAC Path to the Java compiler to use (e.g. '/usr/local/jdk1.3.1/bin/javac' or '/usr/local/bin/jikes'). JAR Path to the jar tool to use (e.g. '/usr/local/jdk1.3.1/bin/jar' or '/usr/local/bin/fastjar'). APPLETVIEWER Path to the appletviewer utility (e.g. '/usr/local/linux-jdk1.3.1/bin/appletviewer'). JAVA Path to the java executable. Use this for executing Java programs (e.g. '/usr/local/jdk1.3.1/bin/java'). JAVADOC Path to the javadoc utility program. JAVAH Path to the javah program. JAVAP Path to the javap program. JAVA_KEYTOOL Path to the keytool utility program. JAVA_N2A Path to the native2ascii tool. JAVA_POLICYTOOL Path to the policytool program. JAVA_SERIALVER Path to the serialver utility program. RMIC Path to the RMI stub/skeleton generator, rmic. RMIREGISTRY Path to the RMI registry program, rmiregistry. RMID Path to the RMI daemon program rmid. JAVA_CLASSES Path to the archive that contains the JDK class files, ${JAVA_HOME}/jre/lib/rt.jar. HAVE_JIKES Defined whenever jikes is used by the port (see USE_JIKES above).
You may use the java-debug make target to get information for debugging your port. It will display the value of many of the forecited variables. Additionally, the following constants are defined so all Java ports may be installed in a consistent way: Constants defined for ports that use Java Constant Value JAVASHAREDIR The base directory for everything related to Java. Default: ${PREFIX}/share/java. JAVAJARDIR The directory where JAR files should be installed. Default: ${JAVASHAREDIR}/classes. JAVALIBDIR The directory where JAR files installed by other ports are located. Default: ${LOCALBASE}/share/java/classes.
The related entries are defined in both PLIST_SUB (documented in ) and SUB_LIST. Building with Ant When the port is to be built using Apache Ant, it has to define USE_ANT. Ant is thus considered to be the sub-make command. When no do-build target is defined by the port, a default one will be set that simply runs Ant according to MAKE_ENV, MAKE_ARGS and ALL_TARGET. This is similar to the USE_GMAKE mechanism, which is documented in . If jikes is used in place of javac (see USE_JIKES in ), then Ant will automatically use it to build the port. Best practices When porting a Java library, your port should install the JAR file(s) in ${JAVAJARDIR}, and everything else under ${JAVASHAREDIR}/${PORTNAME} (except for the documentation, see below). In order to reduce the packing file size, you may reference the JAR file(s) directly in the Makefile. Just use the following statement (where myport.jar is the name of the JAR file installed as part of the port): PLIST_FILES+= %%JAVAJARDIR%%/myport.jar When porting a Java application, the port usually installs everything under a single directory (including its JAR dependencies). The use of ${JAVASHAREDIR}/${PORTNAME} is strongly encouraged in this regard. It is up the porter to decide whether the port should install the additional JAR dependencies under this directory or directly use the already installed ones (from ${JAVAJARDIR}). Regardless of the type of your port (library or application), the additional documentation should be installed in the same location as for any other port. The JavaDoc tool is known to produce a different set of files depending on the version of the JDK that is used. For ports that do not enforce the use of a particular JDK, it is therefore a complex task to specify the packing list (pkg-plist). This is one reason why porters are strongly encouraged to use the PORTDOCS macro. Moreover, even if you can predict the set of files that will be generated by javadoc, the size of the resulting pkg-plist advocates for the use of PORTDOCS. The default value for DATADIR is ${PREFIX}/share/${PORTNAME}. It is a good idea to override DATADIR to ${JAVASHAREDIR}/${PORTNAME} for Java ports. Indeed, DATADIR is automatically added to PLIST_SUB (documented in ) so you may use %%DATADIR%% directly in pkg-plist. As for the choice of building Java ports from source or directly installing them from a binary distribution, there is no defined policy at the time of writing. However, people from the &os; Java Project encourage porters to have their ports built from source whenever it is a trivial task. All the features that have been presented in this section are implemented in bsd.java.mk. If you ever think that your port needs more sophisticated Java support, please first have a look at the bsd.java.mk CVS log as it usually takes some time to document the latest features. Then, if you think the support you are lacking would be beneficial to many other Java ports, feel free to discuss it on the &a.java;. Although there is a java category for PRs, it refers to the JDK porting effort from the &os; Java project. Therefore, you should submit your Java port in the ports category as for any other port, unless the issue you are trying to resolve is related to either a JDK implementation or bsd.java.mk. Similarly, there is a defined policy regarding the CATEGORIES of a Java port, which is detailed in . Web applications, Apache and PHP Apache Variables for ports that use Apache USE_APACHE The port requires Apache. Possible values: yes (gets any version), 1.3, 2.0, 2.2, 2.0+, etc. Default dependency is on version 1.3. WITH_APACHE2 The port requires Apache 2.0. Without this variable, the port will depend on Apache 1.3. This variable is deprecated and should not be used anymore. APXS Full path to the apxs binary. Can be overriden in your port. HTTPD Full path to the httpd binary. Can be overriden in your port. APACHE_VERSION The version of present Apache installation (read-only variable). This variable is only available after inclusion of bsd.port.pre.mk. Possible values: 13, 20, 22. APACHEMODDIR Directory for Apache modules. This variable is automatically expanded in pkg-plist. APACHEINCLUDEDIR Directory for Apache headers. This variable is automatically expanded in pkg-plist. APACHEETCDIR Directory for Apache configuration files. This variable is automatically expanded in pkg-plist.
Useful variables for porting Apache modules MODULENAME Name of the module. Default value is PORTNAME. Example: mod_hello SHORTMODNAME Short name of the module. Automatically derived from MODULENAME, but can be overriden. Example: hello AP_FAST_BUILD Use apxs to compile and install the module. AP_GENPLIST Also automatically creates a pkg-plist. AP_INC Adds a directory to a header search path during compilation. AP_LIB Adds a directory to a library search path during compilation. AP_EXTRAS Additional flags to pass to apxs.
Web applications Web applications should be installed into PREFIX/www/appname. For your convenience, this path is available both in Makefile and in pkg-plist as WWWDIR, and the path relative to PREFIX is available in Makefile as WWWDIR_REL. The user and group of web server process are available as WWWOWN and WWWGRP, in case you need to change the ownership of some files. The default values of both are www. If you want different values for your port, use WWWOWN?= myuser notation, to allow user to override it easily. Do not depend on Apache unless the web app explicitly needs Apache. Respect that users may wish to run your web app on different web server than Apache. PHP Variables for ports that use PHP USE_PHP The port requires PHP. The value yes adds a dependency on PHP. The list of required PHP extensions can be specified instead. Example: pcre xml gettext DEFAULT_PHP_VER Selects which major version of PHP will be installed as a dependency when no PHP is installed yet. Default is 4. Possible values: 4, 5 IGNORE_WITH_PHP The port does not work with PHP of the given version. Possible values: 4, 5 USE_PHPIZE The port will be built as a PHP extension. USE_PHPEXT The port will be treated as a PHP extension, including installation and registration in the extension registry. USE_PHP_BUILD Set PHP as a build dependency. WANT_PHP_CLI Want the CLI (command line) version of PHP. WANT_PHP_CGI Want the CGI version of PHP. WANT_PHP_MOD Want the Apache module version of PHP. WANT_PHP_SCR Want the CLI or the CGI version of PHP. WANT_PHP_WEB Want the Apache module or the CGI version of PHP.
PEAR modules Porting PEAR modules is a very simple process. Use the variables FILES, TESTS, DATA, SQLS, SCRIPTFILES, DOCS and EXAMPLES to list the files you want to install. All listed files will be automatically installed into the appropriate locations and added to pkg-plist. Include ${PORTSDIR}/devel/pear/bsd.pear.mk on the last line of the Makefile. Example Makefile for PEAR class PORTNAME= Date PORTVERSION= 1.4.3 CATEGORIES= devel www pear MAINTAINER= example@domain.com COMMENT= PEAR Date and Time Zone Classes BUILD_DEPENDS= ${PEARDIR}/PEAR.php:${PORTSDIR}/devel/pear-PEAR RUN_DEPENDS= ${BUILD_DEPENDS} FILES= Date.php Date/Calc.php Date/Human.php Date/Span.php \ Date/TimeZone.php TESTS= test_calc.php test_date_methods_span.php testunit.php \ testunit_date.php testunit_date_span.php wknotest.txt \ bug674.php bug727_1.php bug727_2.php bug727_3.php \ bug727_4.php bug967.php weeksinmonth_4_monday.txt \ weeksinmonth_4_sunday.txt weeksinmonth_rdm_monday.txt \ weeksinmonth_rdm_sunday.txt DOCS= TODO _DOCSDIR= . .include <bsd.port.pre.mk> .include "${PORTSDIR}/devel/pear/bsd.pear.mk" .include <bsd.port.post.mk> Using Python The Ports Collection supports parallel installation of multiple Python versions. Ports should make sure to use a correct python interpreter, according to the user-settable PYTHON_VERSION variable. Most prominently, this means replacing the path to python executable in scripts with the value of PYTHON_CMD variable. Ports that install files under PYTHON_SITELIBDIR should use the pyXY- package name prefix, so their package name embeds the version of Python they are installed into. PKGNAMEPREFIX= ${PYTHON_PKGNAMEPREFIX} Most useful variables for ports that use Python USE_PYTHON The port needs Python. Minimal required version can be specified with values such as 2.3+. Version ranges can also be specified, by separating two version numbers with a dash, e.g.: 2.1-2.3 USE_PYDISTUTILS Use Python distutils for configuring, compiling and installing. This is required when the port comes with setup.py. This overrides the do-build and do-install targets and may also override do-configure if GNU_CONFIGURE is not defined. PYTHON_PKGNAMEPREFIX Used as a PKGNAMEPREFIX to distinguish packages for different Python versions. Example: py24- PYTHON_SITELIBDIR Location of the site-packages tree, that contains installation path of Python (usually LOCALBASE). The PYTHON_SITELIBDIR variable can be very useful when installing Python modules. PYTHONPREFIX_SITELIBDIR The PREFIX-clean variant of PYTHON_SITELIBDIR. Always use %%PYTHON_SITELIBDIR%% in pkg-plist when possible. The default value of %%PYTHON_SITELIBDIR%% is lib/python%%PYTHON_VERSION%%/site-packages PYTHON_CMD Python interpreter command line, including version number. PYNUMERIC Dependency line for numeric extension. PYNUMPY Dependency line for the new numeric extension, numpy. (PYNUMERIC is deprecated by upstream vendor). PYXML Dependency line for XML extension (not needed for Python 2.0 and higher as it is also in base distribution). USE_TWISTED Add dependency on twistedCore. The list of required components can be specified as a value of this variable. Example: web lore pair flow USE_ZOPE Add dependency on Zope, a web application platform. Change Python dependency to Python 2.3. Set ZOPEBASEDIR containing a directory with Zope installation.
A complete list of available variables can be found in /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.python.mk. Using <application>Tcl/Tk</application> The Ports Collection supports parallel installation of multiple Tcl/Tk versions. Ports should try to support at least the default Tcl/Tk version and higher with the USE_TCL and USE_TK variables. It is possible to specify the desired version of tcl with the WITH_TCL_VER variable. The most useful variables for ports that use <application>Tcl/Tk</application> USE_TCL The port depends on the Tcl library (not the shell). Minimal required version can be specified with values such as 84+. Individual unsupported versions can be specified with the INVALID_TCL_VER variable. USE_TCL_BUILD The port needs Tcl only during the build time. USE_TCL_WRAPPER Ports that require the Tcl shell and do not require a specific tclsh version should use this new variable. The tclsh wrapper is installed on the system. The user can specify the desired tcl shell to use. WITH_TCL_VER User-defined variable that sets the desired Tcl version. UNIQUENAME_WITH_TCL_VER Like WITH_TCL_VER, but per-port. USE_TCL_THREADS Require a threaded build of Tcl/Tk. USE_TK The port depends on the Tk library (not the wish shell). Implies USE_TCL with the same value. For more information see the description of USE_TCL variable. USE_TK_BUILD Analog to the USE_TCL_BUILD variable. USE_TK_WRAPPER Analog to the USE_TCL_WRAPPER variable. WITH_TK_VER Analog to the WITH_TCL_VER variable and implies WITH_TCL_VER of the same value.
A complete list of available variables can be found in /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.tcl.mk. Using Emacs This section is yet to be written. Using Ruby Useful variables for ports that use Ruby Variable Description USE_RUBY The port requires Ruby. USE_RUBY_EXTCONF The port uses extconf.rb to configure. USE_RUBY_SETUP The port uses setup.rb to configure. RUBY_SETUP Set to the alternative name of setup.rb. Common value is install.rb.
The following table shows the selected variables available to port authors via the ports infrastructure. These variables should be used to install files into their proper locations. Use them in pkg-plist as much as possible. These variables should not be redefined in the port. Selected read-only variables for ports that use Ruby Variable Description Example value RUBY_PKGNAMEPREFIX Used as a PKGNAMEPREFIX to distinguish packages for different Ruby versions. ruby18- RUBY_VERSION Full version of Ruby in the form of x.y.z. 1.8.2 RUBY_SITELIBDIR Architecture independent libraries installation path. /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8 RUBY_SITEARCHLIBDIR Architecture dependent libraries installation path. /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/amd64-freebsd6 RUBY_MODDOCDIR Module documentation installation path. /usr/local/share/doc/ruby18/patsy RUBY_MODEXAMPLESDIR Module examples installation path. /usr/local/share/examples/ruby18/patsy
A complete list of available variables can be found in /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.ruby.mk. Using SDL The USE_SDL variable is used to autoconfigure the dependencies for ports which use an SDL based library like devel/sdl12 and x11-toolkits/sdl_gui. The following SDL libraries are recognized at the moment: sdl: devel/sdl12 gfx: graphics/sdl_gfx gui: x11-toolkits/sdl_gui image: graphics/sdl_image ldbad: devel/sdl_ldbad mixer: audio/sdl_mixer mm: devel/sdlmm net: net/sdl_net sound: audio/sdl_sound ttf: graphics/sdl_ttf Therefore, if a port has a dependency on net/sdl_net and audio/sdl_mixer, the syntax will be: USE_SDL= net mixer The dependency devel/sdl12, which is required by net/sdl_net and audio/sdl_mixer, is automatically added as well. If you use USE_SDL, it will automatically: Add a dependency on sdl12-config to BUILD_DEPENDS Add the variable SDL_CONFIG to CONFIGURE_ENV Add the dependencies of the selected libraries to the LIB_DEPENDS To check whether an SDL library is available, you can do it with the WANT_SDL variable: WANT_SDL=yes .include <bsd.port.pre.mk> .if ${HAVE_SDL:Mmixer}!="" USE_SDL+= mixer .endif .include <bsd.port.post.mk> Using <application>wxWidgets</application> This section describes the status of the wxWidgets libraries in the ports tree and its integration with the ports system. Introduction There are many versions of the wxWidgets libraries which conflict between them (install files under the same name). In the ports tree this problem has been solved by installing each version under a different name using version number suffixes. The obvious disadvantage of this is that each application has to be modified to find the expected version. Fortunately, most of the applications call the wx-config script to determine the necessary compiler and linker flags. The script is named differently for every available version. Majority of applications respect an environment variable, or accept a configure argument, to specify which wx-config script to call. Otherwise they have to be patched. Version selection To make your port use a specific version of wxWidgets there are two variables available for defining (if only one is defined the other will be set to a default value): Variables to select <application>wxWidgets</application> versions Variable Description Default value USE_WX List of versions the port can use All available versions USE_WX_NOT List of versions the port can not use None
The following is a list of available wxWidgets versions and the corresponding ports in the tree: Available <application>wxWidgets</application> versions Version Port 2.4 x11-toolkits/wxgtk24 2.6 x11-toolkits/wxgtk26 2.8 x11-toolkits/wxgtk28
The versions starting from 2.5 also come in Unicode version and are installed by a slave port named like the normal one plus a -unicode suffix, but this can be handled with variables (see ). The variables in can be set to one or more of the following combinations separated by spaces: <application>wxWidgets</application> version specifications Description Example Single version 2.4 Ascending range 2.4+ Descending range 2.6- Full range (must be ascending) 2.4-2.6
There are also some variables to select the preferred versions from the available ones. They can be set to a list of versions, the first ones will have higher priority. Variables to select preferred <application>wxWidgets</application> versions Name Designed for WANT_WX_VER the port WITH_WX_VER the user
Component selection There are other applications that, while not being wxWidgets libraries, are related to them. These applications can be specified in the WX_COMPS variable. The following components are available: Available <application>wxWidgets</application> components Name Description Version restriction wx main library none contrib contributed libraries none python wxPython (Python bindings) 2.4-2.6 mozilla wxMozilla 2.4 svg wxSVG 2.6
The dependency type can be selected for each component by adding a suffix separated by a semicolon. If not present then a default type will be used (see ). The following types are available: Available <application>wxWidgets</application> dependency types Name Description build Component is required for building, equivalent to BUILD_DEPENDS run Component is required for running, equivalent to RUN_DEPENDS lib Component is required for building and running, equivalent to LIB_DEPENDS
The default values for the components are detailed in the following table: Default <application>wxWidgets</application> dependency types Component Dependency type wx lib contrib lib python run mozilla lib svg lib
Selecting <application>wxWidgets</application> components The following fragment corresponds to a port which uses wxWidgets version 2.4 and its contributed libraries. USE_WX= 2.4 WX_COMPS= wx contrib Unicode The wxWidgets library supports Unicode since version 2.5. In the ports tree both versions are available and can be selected with the following variables: Variables to select Unicode in <application>wxWidgets</application> versions Variable Description Designed for WX_UNICODE The port works only with the Unicode version the port WANT_UNICODE The port works with both versions but prefers the Unicode one the port WITH_UNICODE The port will use the Unicode version the user WITHOUT_UNICODE The port will use the normal version if supported (when WX_UNICODE is not defined) the user
Do not use WX_UNICODE for ports that can use both Unicode and normal versions. If you want the port to use Unicode by default define WANT_UNICODE instead. Detecting installed versions To detect an installed version you have to define WANT_WX. If you do not set it to a specific version then the components will have a version suffix. The HAVE_WX variable will be filled after detection. Detecting installed <application>wxWidgets</application> versions and components The following fragment can be used in a port that uses wxWidgets if it is installed, or an option is selected. WANT_WX= yes .include <bsd.port.pre.mk> .if defined(WITH_WX) || ${HAVE_WX:Mwx-2.4} != "" USE_WX= 2.4 CONFIGURE_ARGS+=--enable-wx .endif The following fragment can be used in a port that enables wxPython support if it is installed or if an option is selected, in addition to wxWidgets, both version 2.6. USE_WX= 2.6 WX_COMPS= wx WANT_WX= 2.6 .include <bsd.port.pre.mk> .if defined(WITH_WXPYTHON) || ${HAVE_WX:Mpython} != "" WX_COMPS+= python CONFIGURE_ARGS+=--enable-wxpython .endif Defined variables The following variables are available in the port (after defining one from ). Variables defined for ports that use <application>wxWidgets</application> Name Description WX_CONFIG The path to the wxWidgets wx-config script (with different name) WXRC_CMD The path to the wxWidgets wxrc program (with different name) WX_VERSION The wxWidgets version that is going to be used (e.g., 2.6) WX_UNICODE If not defined but Unicode is going to be used then it will be defined
Processing in <filename>bsd.port.pre.mk</filename> If you need to use the variables for running commands right after including bsd.port.pre.mk you need to define WX_PREMK. If you define WX_PREMK, then the version, dependencies, components and defined variables will not change if you modify the wxWidgets port variables after including bsd.port.pre.mk. Using <application>wxWidgets</application> variables in commands The following fragment illustrates the use of WX_PREMK by running the wx-config script to obtain the full version string, assign it to a variable and pass it to the program. USE_WX= 2.4 WX_PREMK= yes .include <bsd.port.pre.mk> .if exists(${WX_CONFIG}) VER_STR!= ${WX_CONFIG} --release PLIST_SUB+= VERSION="${VER_STR}" .endif The wxWidgets variables can be safely used in commands when they are inside targets without the need of WX_PREMK. Additional <command>configure</command> arguments Some GNU configure scripts can not find wxWidgets with just the WX_CONFIG environment variable set, requiring additional arguments. The WX_CONF_ARGS variable can be used for provide them. Legal values for <makevar>WX_CONF_ARGS</makevar> Possible value Resulting argument absolute --with-wx-config=${WX_CONFIG} relative --with-wx=${LOCALBASE} --with-wx-config=${WX_CONFIG:T}
Using <application>Lua</application> This section describes the status of the Lua libraries in the ports tree and its integration with the ports system. Introduction There are many versions of the Lua libraries and corresponding interpreters, which conflict between them (install files under the same name). In the ports tree this problem has been solved by installing each version under a different name using version number suffixes. The obvious disadvantage of this is that each application has to be modified to find the expected version. But it can be solved by adding some additional flags to the compiler and linker. Version selection To make your port use a specific version of Lua there are two variables available for defining (if only one is defined the other will be set to a default value): Variables to select <application>Lua</application> versions Variable Description Default value USE_LUA List of versions the port can use All available versions USE_LUA_NOT List of versions the port can not use None
The following is a list of available Lua versions and the corresponding ports in the tree: Available <application>Lua</application> versions Version Port 4.0 lang/lua4 5.0 lang/lua50 5.1 lang/lua
The variables in can be set to one or more of the following combinations separated by spaces: <application>Lua</application> version specifications Description Example Single version 4.0 Ascending range 5.0+ Descending range 5.0- Full range (must be ascending) 5.0-5.1
There are also some variables to select the preferred versions from the available ones. They can be set to a list of versions, the first ones will have higher priority. Variables to select preferred <application>Lua</application> versions Name Designed for WANT_LUA_VER the port WITH_LUA_VER the user
Selecting the <application>Lua</application> version The following fragment is from a port which can use Lua version 5.0 or 5.1, and uses 5.0 by default. It can be overriden by the user using WITH_LUA_VER. USE_LUA= 5.0-5.1 WANT_LUA_VER= 5.0 Component selection There are other applications that, while not being Lua libraries, are related to them. These applications can be specified in the LUA_COMPS variable. The following components are available: Available <application>Lua</application> components Name Description Version restriction lua main library none tolua Library for accesing C/C++ code 4.0-5.0 ruby Ruby bindings 4.0-5.0
There are more components but they are modules for the interpreter, not used by applications (only by other modules). The dependency type can be selected for each component by adding a suffix separated by a semicolon. If not present then a default type will be used (see ). The following types are available: Available <application>Lua</application> dependency types Name Description build Component is required for building, equivalent to BUILD_DEPENDS run Component is required for running, equivalent to RUN_DEPENDS lib Component is required for building and running, equivalent to LIB_DEPENDS
The default values for the components are detailed in the following table: Default <application>Lua</application> dependency types Component Dependency type lua lib for 4.0-5.0 (shared) and build for 5.1 (static) tolua build (static) ruby lib (shared)
Selecting <application>Lua</application> components The following fragment corresponds to a port which uses Lua version 4.0 and its Ruby bindings. USE_LUA= 4.0 LUA_COMPS= lua ruby Detecting installed versions To detect an installed version you have to define WANT_LUA. If you do not set it to a specific version then the components will have a version suffix. The HAVE_LUA variable will be filled after detection. Detecting installed <application>Lua</application> versions and components The following fragment can be used in a port that uses Lua if it is installed, or an option is selected. WANT_LUA= yes .include <bsd.port.pre.mk> .if defined(WITH_LUA5) || ${HAVE_LUA:Mlua-5.[01]} != "" USE_LUA= 5.0-5.1 CONFIGURE_ARGS+=--enable-lua5 .endif The following fragment can be used in a port that enables tolua support if it is installed or if an option is selected, in addition to Lua, both version 4.0. USE_LUA= 4.0 LUA_COMPS= lua WANT_LUA= 4.0 .include <bsd.port.pre.mk> .if defined(WITH_TOLUA) || ${HAVE_LUA:Mtolua} != "" LUA_COMPS+= tolua CONFIGURE_ARGS+=--enable-tolua .endif Defined variables The following variables are available in the port (after defining one from ). Variables defined for ports that use <application>Lua</application> Name Description LUA_VER The Lua version that is going to be used (e.g., 5.1) LUA_VER_SH The Lua shared library major version (e.g., 1) LUA_VER_STR The Lua version without the dots (e.g., 51) LUA_PREFIX The prefix where Lua (and components) is installed LUA_SUBDIR The directory under ${PREFIX}/bin, ${PREFIX}/share and ${PREFIX}/lib where Lua is installed LUA_INCDIR The directory where Lua and tolua header files are installed LUA_LIBDIR The directory where Lua and tolua libraries are installed LUA_MODLIBDIR The directory where Lua module libraries (.so) are installed LUA_MODSHAREDIR The directory where Lua modules (.lua) are installed LUA_PKGNAMEPREFIX The package name prefix used by Lua modules LUA_CMD The path to the Lua interpreter LUAC_CMD The path to the Lua compiler TOLUA_CMD The path to the tolua program
Telling the port where to find <application>Lua</application> The following fragment shows how to tell a port that uses a configure script where the Lua header files and libraries are. USE_LUA= 4.0 GNU_CONFIGURE= yes CONFIGURE_ENV= CPPFLAGS="-I${LUA_INCDIR}" LDFLAGS="-L${LUA_LIBDIR}" Processing in <filename>bsd.port.pre.mk</filename> If you need to use the variables for running commands right after including bsd.port.pre.mk you need to define LUA_PREMK. If you define LUA_PREMK, then the version, dependencies, components and defined variables will not change if you modify the Lua port variables after including bsd.port.pre.mk. Using <application>Lua</application> variables in commands The following fragment illustrates the use of LUA_PREMK by running the Lua interpreter to obtain the full version string, assign it to a variable and pass it to the program. USE_LUA= 5.0 LUA_PREMK= yes .include <bsd.port.pre.mk> .if exists(${LUA_CMD}) VER_STR!= ${LUA_CMD} -v CFLAGS+= -DLUA_VERSION_STRING="${VER_STR}" .endif The Lua variables can be safely used in commands when they are inside targets without the need of LUA_PREMK. Using Xfce The USE_XFCE variable is used to autoconfigure the dependencies for ports which use an Xfce based library or application like x11-toolkits/libxfce4gui and x11-wm/xfce4-panel. The following Xfce libraries and applications are recognized at the moment: libexo: x11/libexo libgui: x11-toolkits/libxfce4gui libutil: x11/libxfce4util libmcs: x11/libxfce4mcs mcsmanager: sysutils/xfce4-mcs-manager panel: x11-wm/xfce4-panel thunar: x11-fm/thunar wm: x11-wm/xfce4-wm xfdev: dev/xfce4-dev-tools The following additional parameters are recognized: configenv: Use this if your port requires a special modified CONFIGURE_ENV to find it's required libraries. -I${LOCALBASE}/include -L${LOCALBASE}/lib gets added to CPPFLAGS to CONFIGURE_ENV. Therefore, if a port has a dependency on sysutils/xfce4-mcs-manager and requires the special CPPFLAGS in its configure environment, the syntax will be: USE_XFCE= mcsmanager configenv Using databases Variables for ports using databases Variable Means USE_BDB If variable is set to yes, add dependency on databases/db41 port. The variable may also be set to values: 2, 3, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, or 47. You can declare a range of acceptable values, USE_BDB=42+ will find the highest installed version, and fall back to 42 if nothing else is installed. USE_MYSQL If variable is set to yes, add dependency on databases/mysql50-server port. An associated variable, WANT_MYSQL_VER, may be set to values such as 323, 40, 41, 50, 51 or 60. USE_PGSQL If set to yes, add dependency on databases/postgresql82 port. An associated variable, WANT_PGSQL_VER, may be set to values such as 73, 74, 80, 81, 82, or 83.
Starting and stopping services (rc scripts) rc.d scripts are used to start services on system startup, and to give administrators a standard way of stopping, starting and restarting the service. Ports integrate into the system rc.d framework. Details on its usage can be found in the rc.d Handbook chapter. Detailed explanation of available commands is provided in &man.rc.8; and &man.rc.subr.8;. Finally, there is an article on practical aspects of rc.d scripting. One or more rc scripts can be installed: USE_RC_SUBR= doormand Scripts must be placed in the files subdirectory and a .in suffix must be added to their filename. The only difference from a base system rc.d script is that the . /etc/rc.subr line must be replaced with the . %%RC_SUBR%%, because older versions of &os; do not have an /etc/rc.subr file. Standard SUB_LIST expansions are used too. Use of the %%PREFIX%% and %%LOCALBASE%% expansions is strongly encouraged as well. More on SUB_LIST in the relevant section. Prior to &os; 6.1-RELEASE, integration with &man.rcorder.8; is available by using USE_RCORDER instead of USE_RC_SUBR. However, use of this method is deprecated. As of &os; 6.1-RELEASE, local rc.d scripts (including those installed by ports) are included in the overall &man.rcorder.8; of the base system. Example simple rc.d script: #!/bin/sh # $FreeBSD$ # # PROVIDE: doormand # REQUIRE: LOGIN # KEYWORD: shutdown # # Add the following lines to /etc/rc.conf.local or /etc/rc.conf # to enable this service: # # doormand_enable (bool): Set to NO by default. # Set it to YES to enable doormand. # doormand_config (path): Set to %%PREFIX%%/etc/doormand/doormand.cf # by default. # . /etc/rc.subr name="doormand" rcvar=${name}_enable command=%%PREFIX%%/sbin/${name} pidfile=/var/run/${name}.pid load_rc_config $name : ${doormand_enable="NO"} : ${doormand_config="%%PREFIX%%/etc/doormand/doormand.cf"} command_args="-p $pidfile -f $doormand_config" run_rc_command "$1" Unless there is a good reason to start the service earlier all ports scripts should use REQUIRE: LOGIN If the service runs as a particular user (other than root) this is mandatory. KEYWORD: shutdown is included in the script above because the mythical port we are using as an example starts a service, and should be shut down cleanly when the system shuts down. If the script is not starting a persistent service this is not necessary. The "=" style of default variable assignment is preferable to the ":=" style here, since the former sets a default value only if the variable is unset, and the latter sets one if the variable is unset or null. A user might very well include something like doormand_flags="" in their rc.conf.local file, and a variable substitution using ":=" would inappropriately override the user's intention. The suffix of the rc script is provided in RC_SUBR_SUFFIX for further use in the port's Makefile. Current versions of &os; do not add any suffix to the script name, but older versions used to add .sh suffix. No new scripts should be added with the .sh suffix. At some point there will be a mass repocopy of all the scripts that still have that suffix. Stopping services at deinstall It is possible to have a service stopped automatically as part of the deinstall routine. We advise using this feature only when it's absolutely necessary to stop a service before it's files go away. Usually, it's up to the administrator's discretion to decide, whether to stop the service on deinstall or not. Also note this affects upgrades, too. Line like this goes to the pkg-plist: @stopdaemon doormand The argument must match the content of USE_RC_SUBR variable. Adding users and groups Some ports require a certain user to be on the installed system. Choose a free UID from 50 to 999 and register it either in ports/UIDs (for users) or in ports/GIDs (for groups). Make sure you do not use a UID already used by the system or other ports. Please include a patch against these two files when you require a new user or group to be created for your port. Then you can use USERS and GROUPS variables in your Makefile, and the user will be automatically created when installing the port. USERS= pulse GROUPS= pulse pulse-access pulse-rt The current list of reserved UIDs and GIDs can be found in ports/UIDs and ports/GIDs. Advanced <filename>pkg-plist</filename> practices Changing <filename>pkg-plist</filename> based on make variables Some ports, particularly the p5- ports, need to change their pkg-plist depending on what options they are configured with (or version of perl, in the case of p5- ports). To make this easy, any instances in the pkg-plist of %%OSREL%%, %%PERL_VER%%, and %%PERL_VERSION%% will be substituted for appropriately. The value of %%OSREL%% is the numeric revision of the operating system (e.g., 4.9). %%PERL_VERSION%% and %%PERL_VER%% is the full version number of perl (e.g., 5.8.9). Several other %%VARS%% related to port's documentation files are described in the relevant section. If you need to make other substitutions, you can set the PLIST_SUB variable with a list of VAR=VALUE pairs and instances of %%VAR%% will be substituted with VALUE in the pkg-plist. For instance, if you have a port that installs many files in a version-specific subdirectory, you can put something like OCTAVE_VERSION= 2.0.13 PLIST_SUB= OCTAVE_VERSION=${OCTAVE_VERSION} in the Makefile and use %%OCTAVE_VERSION%% wherever the version shows up in pkg-plist. That way, when you upgrade the port, you will not have to change dozens (or in some cases, hundreds) of lines in the pkg-plist. If your port installs files conditionally on the options set in the port, the usual way of handling it is prefixing the pkg-plist lines with a %%TAG%% and adding that TAG to the PLIST_SUB variable inside the Makefile with a special value of @comment, which makes package tools to ignore the line: .if defined(WITH_X11) PLIST_SUB+= X11="" .else PLIST_SUB+= X11="@comment " .endif and in the pkg-plist: %%X11%%bin/foo-gui This substitution (as well as addition of any manual pages) will be done between the pre-install and do-install targets, by reading from PLIST and writing to TMPPLIST (default: WRKDIR/.PLIST.mktmp). So if your port builds PLIST on the fly, do so in or before pre-install. Also, if your port needs to edit the resulting file, do so in post-install to a file named TMPPLIST. Another possibility to modify port's packing list is based on setting the variables PLIST_FILES and PLIST_DIRS. The value of each variable is regarded as a list of pathnames to write to TMPPLIST along with PLIST contents. Names listed in PLIST_FILES and PLIST_DIRS are subject to %%VAR%% substitution, as described above. Except for that, names from PLIST_FILES will appear in the final packing list unchanged, while @dirrm will be prepended to names from PLIST_DIRS. To take effect, PLIST_FILES and PLIST_DIRS must be set before TMPPLIST is written, i.e. in pre-install or earlier. Empty directories Cleaning up empty directories Do make your ports remove empty directories when they are de-installed. This is usually accomplished by adding @dirrm lines for all directories that are specifically created by the port. You need to delete subdirectories before you can delete parent directories. : lib/X11/oneko/pixmaps/cat.xpm lib/X11/oneko/sounds/cat.au : @dirrm lib/X11/oneko/pixmaps @dirrm lib/X11/oneko/sounds @dirrm lib/X11/oneko However, sometimes @dirrm will give you errors because other ports share the same directory. You can use @dirrmtry to remove only empty directories without warning. @dirrmtry share/doc/gimp This will neither print any error messages nor cause &man.pkg.delete.1; to exit abnormally even if ${PREFIX}/share/doc/gimp is not empty due to other ports installing some files in there. Creating empty directories Empty directories created during port installation need special attention. They will not get created when installing the package, because packages only store the files, and &man.pkg.add.1; creates directories for them as needed. To make sure the empty directory is created when installing the package, add this line to pkg-plist above the corresponding @dirrm line: @exec mkdir -p %D/share/foo/templates Configuration files If your port requires some configuration files in PREFIX/etc, do not just install them and list them in pkg-plist. That will cause &man.pkg.delete.1; to delete files carefully edited by the user and a new installation to wipe them out. Instead, install sample files with a suffix (filename.sample will work well). Copy the sample file as the real configuration file, if it does not exist. On deinstall, delete the configuration file, but only if it was not modified by the user. You need to handle this both in the port Makefile, and in the pkg-plist (for installation from the package). Example of the Makefile part: post-install: @if [ ! -f ${PREFIX}/etc/orbit.conf ]; then \ ${CP} -p ${PREFIX}/etc/orbit.conf.sample ${PREFIX}/etc/orbit.conf ; \ fi Example of the pkg-plist part: @unexec if cmp -s %D/etc/orbit.conf.sample %D/etc/orbit.conf; then rm -f %D/etc/orbit.conf; fi etc/orbit.conf.sample @exec if [ ! -f %D/etc/orbit.conf ] ; then cp -p %D/%F %B/orbit.conf; fi Alternatively, print out a message pointing out that the user has to copy and edit the file before the software can be made to work. Dynamic vs. static package list A static package list is a package list which is available in the Ports Collection either as a pkg-plist file (with or without variable substitution), or embedded into the Makefile via PLIST_FILES and PLIST_DIRS. Even if the contents are auto-generated by a tool or a target in the Makefile before the inclusion into the Ports Collection by a committer, this is still considered a static list, since it is possible to examine it without having to download or compile the distfile. A dynamic package list is a package list which is generated at the time the port is compiled based upon the files and directories which are installed. It is not possible to examine it before the source code of the ported application is downloaded and compiled, or after running a make clean. While the use of dynamic package lists is not forbidden, maintainers should use static package lists wherever possible, as it enables users to &man.grep.1; through available ports to discover, for example, which port installs a certain file. Dynamic lists should be primarily used for complex ports where the package list changes drastically based upon optional features of the port (and thus maintaining a static package list is infeasible), or ports which change the package list based upon the version of dependent software used (e.g. ports which generate docs with Javadoc). Maintainers who prefer dynamic package lists are encouraged to add a new target to their port which generates the pkg-plist file so that users may examine the contents. Automated package list creation First, make sure your port is almost complete, with only pkg-plist missing. Next, create a temporary directory tree into which your port can be installed, and install any dependencies. &prompt.root; mkdir /var/tmp/$(make -V PORTNAME) &prompt.root; mtree -U -f $(make -V MTREE_FILE) -d -e -p /var/tmp/$(make -V PORTNAME) &prompt.root; make depends PREFIX=/var/tmp/$(make -V PORTNAME) Store the directory structure in a new file. &prompt.root; (cd /var/tmp/$(make -V PORTNAME) && find -d * -type d) | sort > OLD-DIRS Create an empty pkg-plist file: &prompt.root; :>pkg-plist If your port honors PREFIX (which it should) you can then install the port and create the package list. &prompt.root; make install PREFIX=/var/tmp/$(make -V PORTNAME) &prompt.root; (cd /var/tmp/$(make -V PORTNAME) && find -d * \! -type d) | sort > pkg-plist You must also add any newly created directories to the packing list. &prompt.root; (cd /var/tmp/$(make -V PORTNAME) && find -d * -type d) | sort | comm -13 OLD-DIRS - | sort -r | sed -e 's#^#@dirrm #' >> pkg-plist Finally, you need to tidy up the packing list by hand; it is not all automated. Manual pages should be listed in the port's Makefile under MANn, and not in the package list. User configuration files should be removed, or installed as filename.sample. The info/dir file should not be listed and appropriate install-info lines should be added as noted in the info files section. Any libraries installed by the port should be listed as specified in the shared libraries section. Alternatively, use the plist script in /usr/ports/Tools/scripts/ to build the package list automatically. The plist script is a Ruby script that automates most of the manual steps outlined in the previous paragraphs. The first step is the same as above: take the first three lines, that is, mkdir, mtree and make depends. Then build and install the port: &prompt.root; make install PREFIX=/var/tmp/$(make -V PORTNAME) And let plist create the pkg-plist file: &prompt.root; /usr/ports/Tools/scripts/plist -Md -m $(make -V MTREE_FILE) /var/tmp/$(make -V PORTNAME) > pkg-plist The packing list still has to be tidied up by hand as stated above. Another tool that might be used to create an initial pkg-plist is ports-mgmt/genplist. As with any automated tool, the resulting pkg-plist should be checked and manually edited as needed. The <filename>pkg-<replaceable>*</replaceable></filename> files There are some tricks we have not mentioned yet about the pkg-* files that come in handy sometimes. <filename>pkg-message</filename> If you need to display a message to the installer, you may place the message in pkg-message. This capability is often useful to display additional installation steps to be taken after a &man.pkg.add.1; or to display licensing information. When some lines about the build-time knobs or warnings have to be displayed, use ECHO_MSG. The pkg-message file is only for post-installation steps. Likewise, the distinction between ECHO_MSG and ECHO_CMD should be kept in mind. The former is for printing informational text to the screen, while the latter is for command pipelining. A good example for both can be found in shells/bash2/Makefile: update-etc-shells: @${ECHO_MSG} "updating /etc/shells" @${CP} /etc/shells /etc/shells.bak @( ${GREP} -v ${PREFIX}/bin/bash /etc/shells.bak; \ ${ECHO_CMD} ${PREFIX}/bin/bash) >/etc/shells @${RM} /etc/shells.bak The pkg-message file does not need to be added to pkg-plist. Also, it will not get automatically printed if the user is using the port, not the package, so you should probably display it from the post-install target yourself. <filename>pkg-install</filename> If your port needs to execute commands when the binary package is installed with &man.pkg.add.1; you can do this via the pkg-install script. This script will automatically be added to the package, and will be run twice by &man.pkg.add.1;: the first time as ${SH} pkg-install ${PKGNAME} PRE-INSTALL and the second time as ${SH} pkg-install ${PKGNAME} POST-INSTALL. $2 can be tested to determine which mode the script is being run in. The PKG_PREFIX environmental variable will be set to the package installation directory. See &man.pkg.add.1; for additional information. This script is not run automatically if you install the port with make install. If you are depending on it being run, you will have to explicitly call it from your port's Makefile, with a line like PKG_PREFIX=${PREFIX} ${SH} ${PKGINSTALL} ${PKGNAME} PRE-INSTALL. <filename>pkg-deinstall</filename> This script executes when a package is removed. This script will be run twice by &man.pkg.delete.1;. The first time as ${SH} pkg-deinstall ${PKGNAME} DEINSTALL and the second time as ${SH} pkg-deinstall ${PKGNAME} POST-DEINSTALL. <filename>pkg-req</filename> If your port needs to determine if it should install or not, you can create a pkg-req requirements script. It will be invoked automatically at installation/de-installation time to determine whether or not installation/de-installation should proceed. The script will be run at installation time by &man.pkg.add.1; as pkg-req ${PKGNAME} INSTALL. At de-installation time it will be run by &man.pkg.delete.1; as pkg-req ${PKGNAME} DEINSTALL. Changing the names of <filename>pkg-<replaceable>*</replaceable></filename> files All the names of pkg-* files are defined using variables so you can change them in your Makefile if need be. This is especially useful when you are sharing the same pkg-* files among several ports or have to write to one of the above files (see writing to places other than WRKDIR for why it is a bad idea to write directly into the pkg-* subdirectory). Here is a list of variable names and their default values. (PKGDIR defaults to ${MASTERDIR}.) Variable Default value DESCR ${PKGDIR}/pkg-descr PLIST ${PKGDIR}/pkg-plist PKGINSTALL ${PKGDIR}/pkg-install PKGDEINSTALL ${PKGDIR}/pkg-deinstall PKGREQ ${PKGDIR}/pkg-req PKGMESSAGE ${PKGDIR}/pkg-message Please change these variables rather than overriding PKG_ARGS. If you change PKG_ARGS, those files will not correctly be installed in /var/db/pkg upon install from a port. Making use of <makevar>SUB_FILES</makevar> and <makevar>SUB_LIST</makevar> The SUB_FILES and SUB_LIST variables are useful for dynamic values in port files, such as the installation PREFIX in pkg-message. The SUB_FILES variable specifies a list of files to be automatically modified. Each file in the SUB_FILES list must have a corresponding file.in present in FILESDIR. A modified version will be created in WRKDIR. Files defined as a value of USE_RC_SUBR (or the deprecated USE_RCORDER) are automatically added to the SUB_FILES. For the files pkg-message, pkg-install, pkg-deinstall and pkg-reg, the corresponding Makefile variable is automatically set to point to the processed version. The SUB_LIST variable is a list of VAR=VALUE pairs. For each pair %%VAR%% will get replaced with VALUE in each file listed in SUB_FILES. Several common pairs are automatically defined: PREFIX, LOCALBASE, DATADIR, DOCSDIR, EXAMPLESDIR. Any line beginning with @comment will be deleted from resulting files after a variable substitution. The following example will replace %%ARCH%% with the system architecture in a pkg-message: SUB_FILES= pkg-message SUB_LIST= ARCH=${ARCH} Note that for this example, the pkg-message.in file must exist in FILESDIR. Example of a good pkg-message.in: Now it is time to configure this package. Copy %%PREFIX%%/share/examples/putsy/%%ARCH%%.conf into your home directory as .putsy.conf and edit it. Testing your port Running <command>make describe</command> Several of the &os; port maintenance tools, such as &man.portupgrade.1;, rely on a database called /usr/ports/INDEX which keeps track of such items as port dependencies. INDEX is created by the top-level ports/Makefile via make index, which descends into each port subdirectory and executes make describe there. Thus, if make describe fails in any port, no one can generate INDEX, and many people will quickly become unhappy. It is important to be able to generate this file no matter what options are present in make.conf, so please avoid doing things such as using .error statements when (for instance) a dependency is not satisfied. (See .) If make describe produces a string rather than an error message, you are probably safe. See bsd.port.mk for the meaning of the string produced. Also note that running a recent version of portlint (as specified in the next section) will cause make describe to be run automatically. Portlint Do check your work with portlint before you submit or commit it. portlint warns you about many common errors, both functional and stylistic. For a new (or repocopied) port, portlint -A is the most thorough; for an existing port, portlint -C is sufficient. Since portlint uses heuristics to try to figure out errors, it can produce false positive warnings. In addition, occasionally something that is flagged as a problem really cannot be done in any other way due to limitations in the ports framework. When in doubt, the best thing to do is ask on &a.ports;. Port Tools The ports-mgmt/porttools program is part of the Ports Collection. port is the front-end script, which can help you simplify the testing job. Whenever you want to test a new port or update an existing one, you can use port test to test your port, including the portlint checking. This command also detects and lists any files that are not listed in pkg-plist. See the following example: &prompt.root; port test /usr/ports/net/csup <makevar>PREFIX</makevar> and <makevar>DESTDIR</makevar> PREFIX determines the location where the port will install. It is usually /usr/local or /opt, but can be set to a custom path. Your port must respect this variable. DESTDIR, if set by user, determines the complete alternative environment, usually a jail, or an installed system mounted elsewhere than /. A port will actually install into DESTDIR/PREFIX, and register with the package database in DESTDIR/var/db/pkg. As DESTDIR is handled automatically by the ports infrastructure via calling &man.chroot.8;, you do not need any modifications or any extra care to write DESTDIR-compliant ports. The value of PREFIX will be set to LOCALBASE (default /usr/local). If USE_LINUX_PREFIX is set, PREFIX will be LINUXBASE (default /compat/linux). Avoiding the hard-coding of /usr/local or /usr/X11R6 anywhere in the source will make the port much more flexible and able to cater to the needs of other sites. For X ports that use imake, this is automatic; otherwise, this can often be done by simply replacing the occurrences of /usr/local (or /usr/X11R6 for X ports that do not use imake) in the various Makefiles in the port to read ${PREFIX}, as this variable is automatically passed down to every stage of the build and install processes. Make sure your application is not installing things in /usr/local instead of PREFIX. A quick test for this is to do this is: &prompt.root; make clean; make package PREFIX=/var/tmp/$(make -V PORTNAME) If anything is installed outside of PREFIX, the package creation process will complain that it cannot find the files. This does not test for the existence of internal references, or correct use of LOCALBASE for references to files from other ports. Testing the installation in /var/tmp/$(make -V PORTNAME) to do that while you have it installed would do that. The variable PREFIX can be reassigned in your Makefile or in the user's environment. However, it is strongly discouraged for individual ports to set this variable explicitly in the Makefiles. Also, refer to programs/files from other ports with the variables mentioned above, not explicit pathnames. For instance, if your port requires a macro PAGER to be the full pathname of less, use the compiler flag: -DPAGER=\"${LOCALBASE}/bin/less\" instead of -DPAGER=\"/usr/local/bin/less\". This way it will have a better chance of working if the system administrator has moved the whole /usr/local tree somewhere else. Tinderbox If you're an avid ports contributor, you might want to take a look at Tinderbox. It is a powerful system for building and testing ports based on the scripts used on Pointyhat. You can install Tinderbox using ports-mgmt/tinderbox port. Be sure to read supplied documentation since the configuration is not trivial. Visit the Tinderbox website for more details. Upgrading When you notice that a port is out of date compared to the latest version from the original authors, you should first ensure that you have the latest port. You can find them in the ports/ports-current directory of the &os; FTP mirror sites. However, if you are working with more than a few ports, you will probably find it easier to use CVSup to keep your whole ports collection up-to-date, as described in the Handbook. This will have the added benefit of tracking all the ports' dependencies. The next step is to see if there is an update already pending. To do this, you have two options. There is a searchable interface to the FreeBSD Problem Report (PR) database (also known as GNATS). Select ports in the dropdown, and enter the name of the port. However, sometimes people forget to put the name of the port into the Synopsis field in an unambiguous fashion. In that case, you can try the FreeBSD Ports Monitoring System (also known as portsmon). This system attempts to classify port PRs by portname. To search for PRs about a particular port, use the Overview of One Port. If there is no pending PR, the next step is to send an email to the port's maintainer, as shown by make maintainer. That person may already be working on an upgrade, or have a reason to not upgrade the port right now (because of, for example, stability problems of the new version); you would not want to duplicate their work. Note that unmaintained ports are listed with a maintainer of ports@FreeBSD.org, which is just the general ports mailing list, so sending mail there probably will not help in this case. If the maintainer asks you to do the upgrade or there is no maintainer, then you have a chance to help out &os; by preparing the update yourself! Please make the changes and save the result of the recursive diff output of the new and old ports directories (e.g., if your modified port directory is called superedit and the original is in our tree as superedit.bak, then save the result of diff -ruN superedit.bak superedit). Either unified or context diff is fine, but port committers generally prefer unified diffs. Note the use of the -N option—this is the accepted way to force diff to properly deal with the case of new files being added or old files being deleted. Before sending us the diff, please examine the output to make sure all the changes make sense. To simplify common operations with patch files, you can use /usr/ports/Tools/scripts/patchtool.py. Before using it, please read /usr/ports/Tools/scripts/README.patchtool. If the port is unmaintained, and you are actively using it yourself, please consider volunteering to become its maintainer. &os; has over 2000 ports without maintainers, and this is an area where more volunteers are always needed. (For a detailed description of the responsibilities of maintainers, refer to the section in the Developer's Handbook.) The best way to send us the diff is by including it via &man.send-pr.1; (category ports). If you are maintaining the port, be sure to put [maintainer update] at the beginning of your synopsis line and set the Class of your PR to maintainer-update. Otherwise, the Class of your PR should be change-request. Please mention any added or deleted files in the message, as they have to be explicitly specified to &man.cvs.1; when doing a commit. If the diff is more than about 20KB, please compress and uuencode it; otherwise, just include it in the PR as is. Before you &man.send-pr.1;, you should review the Writing the problem report section in the Problem Reports article; it contains far more information about how to write useful problem reports. If your upgrade is motivated by security concerns or a serious fault in the currently committed port, please notify the &a.portmgr; to request immediate rebuilding and redistribution of your port's package. Unsuspecting users of &man.pkg.add.1; will otherwise continue to install the old version via pkg_add -r for several weeks. Once again, please use &man.diff.1; and not &man.shar.1; to send updates to existing ports! Now that you have done all that, you will want to read about how to keep up-to-date in . Ports security Why security is so important Bugs are occasionally introduced to the software. Arguably, the most dangerous of them are those opening security vulnerabilities. From the technical viewpoint, such vulnerabilities are to be closed by exterminating the bugs that caused them. However, the policies for handling mere bugs and security vulnerabilities are very different. A typical small bug affects only those users who have enabled some combination of options triggering the bug. The developer will eventually release a patch followed by a new version of the software, free of the bug, but the majority of users will not take the trouble of upgrading immediately because the bug has never vexed them. A critical bug that may cause data loss represents a graver issue. Nevertheless, prudent users know that a lot of possible accidents, besides software bugs, are likely to lead to data loss, and so they make backups of important data; in addition, a critical bug will be discovered really soon. A security vulnerability is all different. First, it may remain unnoticed for years because often it does not cause software malfunction. Second, a malicious party can use it to gain unauthorized access to a vulnerable system, to destroy or alter sensitive data; and in the worst case the user will not even notice the harm caused. Third, exposing a vulnerable system often assists attackers to break into other systems that could not be compromised otherwise. Therefore closing a vulnerability alone is not enough: the audience should be notified of it in most clear and comprehensive manner, which will allow to evaluate the danger and take appropriate actions. Fixing security vulnerabilities While on the subject of ports and packages, a security vulnerability may initially appear in the original distribution or in the port files. In the former case, the original software developer is likely to release a patch or a new version instantly, and you will only need to update the port promptly with respect to the author's fix. If the fix is delayed for some reason, you should either mark the port as FORBIDDEN or introduce a patch file of your own to the port. In the case of a vulnerable port, just fix the port as soon as possible. In either case, the standard procedure for submitting your change should be followed unless you have rights to commit it directly to the ports tree. Being a ports committer is not enough to commit to an arbitrary port. Remember that ports usually have maintainers, whom you should respect. Please make sure that the port's revision is bumped as soon as the vulnerability has been closed. That is how the users who upgrade installed packages on a regular basis will see they need to run an update. Besides, a new package will be built and distributed over FTP and WWW mirrors, replacing the vulnerable one. PORTREVISION should be bumped unless PORTVERSION has changed in the course of correcting the vulnerability. That is you should bump PORTREVISION if you have added a patch file to the port, but you should not if you have updated the port to the latest software version and thus already touched PORTVERSION. Please refer to the corresponding section for more information. Keeping the community informed The VuXML database A very important and urgent step to take as early as a security vulnerability is discovered is to notify the community of port users about the jeopardy. Such notification serves two purposes. First, should the danger be really severe, it will be wise to apply an instant workaround, e.g., stop the affected network service or even deinstall the port completely, until the vulnerability is closed. Second, a lot of users tend to upgrade installed packages just occasionally. They will know from the notification that they must update the package without delay as soon as a corrected version is available. Given the huge number of ports in the tree, a security advisory cannot be issued on each incident without creating a flood and losing the attention of the audience by the time it comes to really serious matters. Therefore security vulnerabilities found in ports are recorded in the FreeBSD VuXML database. The Security Officer Team members are monitoring it for issues requiring their intervention. If you have committer rights, you can update the VuXML database by yourself. So you will both help the Security Officer Team and deliver the crucial information to the community earlier. However, if you are not a committer, or you believe you have found an exceptionally severe vulnerability, or whatever, please do not hesitate to contact the Security Officer Team directly as described on the FreeBSD Security Information page. All right, you elected the hard way. As it may be obvious from its title, the VuXML database is essentially an XML document. Its source file vuln.xml is kept right inside the port security/vuxml. Therefore the file's full pathname will be PORTSDIR/security/vuxml/vuln.xml. Each time you discover a security vulnerability in a port, please add an entry for it to that file. Until you are familiar with VuXML, the best thing you can do is to find an existing entry fitting your case, then copy it and use as a template. A short introduction to VuXML The full-blown XML is complex and far beyond the scope of this book. However, to gain basic insight on the structure of a VuXML entry, you need only the notion of tags. XML tag names are enclosed in angle brackets. Each opening <tag> must have a matching closing </tag>. Tags may be nested. If nesting, the inner tags must be closed before the outer ones. There is a hierarchy of tags, i.e. more complex rules of nesting them. Sounds very similar to HTML, doesn't it? The major difference is that XML is eXtensible, i.e. based on defining custom tags. Due to its intrinsic structure, XML puts otherwise amorphous data into shape. VuXML is particularly tailored to mark up descriptions of security vulnerabilities. Now let's consider a realistic VuXML entry: <vuln vid="f4bc80f4-da62-11d8-90ea-0004ac98a7b9"> <topic>Several vulnerabilities found in Foo</topic> <affects> <package> <name>foo</name> <name>foo-devel</name> <name>ja-foo</name> <range><ge>1.6</ge><lt>1.9</lt></range> <range><ge>2.*</ge><lt>2.4_1</lt></range> <range><eq>3.0b1</eq></range> </package> <package> <name>openfoo</name> <range><lt>1.10_7</lt></range> <range><ge>1.2,1</ge><lt>1.3_1,1</lt></range> </package> </affects> <description> <body xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <p>J. Random Hacker reports:</p> <blockquote cite="http://j.r.hacker.com/advisories/1"> <p>Several issues in the Foo software may be exploited via carefully crafted QUUX requests. These requests will permit the injection of Bar code, mumble theft, and the readability of the Foo administrator account.</p> </blockquote> </body> </description> <references> <freebsdsa>SA-10:75.foo</freebsdsa> <freebsdpr>ports/987654</freebsdpr> <cvename>CAN-2010-0201</cvename> <cvename>CAN-2010-0466</cvename> <bid>96298</bid> <certsa>CA-2010-99</certsa> <certvu>740169</certvu> <uscertsa>SA10-99A</uscertsa> <uscertta>SA10-99A</uscertta> <mlist msgid="201075606@hacker.com">http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=bugtraq&amp;m=203886607825605</mlist> <url>http://j.r.hacker.com/advisories/1</url> </references> <dates> <discovery>2010-05-25</discovery> <entry>2010-07-13</entry> <modified>2010-09-17</modified> </dates> </vuln> The tag names are supposed to be self-descriptive, so we shall take a closer look only at fields you will need to fill in by yourself: This is the top-level tag of a VuXML entry. It has a mandatory attribute, vid, specifying a universally unique identifier (UUID) for this entry (in quotes). You should generate a UUID for each new VuXML entry (and do not forget to substitute it for the template UUID unless you are writing the entry from scratch). You can use &man.uuidgen.1; to generate a VuXML UUID; alternatively, if you are using FreeBSD 4.x, you may install the port devel/p5-Data-UUID and issue the following command: perl -MData::UUID -le 'print lc new Data::UUID->create_str' This is a one-line description of the issue found. The names of packages affected are listed there. Multiple names can be given since several packages may be based on a single master port or software product. This may include stable and development branches, localized versions, and slave ports featuring different choices of important build-time configuration options. It is your responsibility to find all such related packages when writing a VuXML entry. Keep in mind that make search name=foo is your friend. The primary points to look for are as follows: the foo-devel variant for a foo port; other variants with a suffix like -a4 (for print-related packages), -without-gui (for packages with X support disabled), or similar; jp-, ru-, zh-, and other possible localized variants in the corresponding national categories of the ports collection. Affected versions of the package(s) are specified there as one or more ranges using a combination of <lt>, <le>, <eq>, <ge>, and <gt> elements. The version ranges given should not overlap. In a range specification, * (asterisk) denotes the smallest version number. In particular, 2.* is less than 2.a. Therefore an asterisk may be used for a range to match all possible alpha, beta, and RC versions. For instance, <ge>2.*</ge><lt>3.*</lt> will selectively match every 2.x version while <ge>2.0</ge><lt>3.0</lt> will obviously not since the latter misses 2.r3 and matches 3.b. The above example specifies that affected are versions from 1.6 to 1.9 inclusive, versions 2.x before 2.4_1, and version 3.0b1. Several related package groups (essentially, ports) can be listed in the <affected> section. This can be used if several software products (say FooBar, FreeBar and OpenBar) grow from the same code base and still share its bugs and vulnerabilities. Note the difference from listing multiple names within a single <package> section. The version ranges should allow for PORTEPOCH and PORTREVISION if applicable. Please remember that according to the collation rules, a version with a non-zero PORTEPOCH is greater than any version without PORTEPOCH, e.g., 3.0,1 is greater than 3.1 or even than 8.9. This is a summary of the issue. XHTML is used in this field. At least enclosing <p> and </p> should appear. More complex mark-up may be used, but only for the sake of accuracy and clarity: No eye candy please. This section contains references to relevant documents. As many references as apply are encouraged. This is a FreeBSD security advisory. This is a FreeBSD problem report. This is a Mitre CVE identifier. This is a SecurityFocus Bug ID. This is a US-CERT security advisory. This is a US-CERT vulnerability note. This is a US-CERT Cyber Security Alert. This is a US-CERT Technical Cyber Security Alert. This is a URL to an archived posting in a mailing list. The attribute msgid is optional and may specify the message ID of the posting. This is a generic URL. It should be used only if none of the other reference categories apply. This is the date when the issue was disclosed (YYYY-MM-DD). This is the date when the entry was added (YYYY-MM-DD). This is the date when any information in the entry was last modified (YYYY-MM-DD). New entries must not include this field. It should be added upon editing an existing entry. Testing your changes to the VuXML database Assume you just wrote or filled in an entry for a vulnerability in the package clamav that has been fixed in version 0.65_7. As a prerequisite, you need to install fresh versions of the ports ports-mgmt/portaudit and ports-mgmt/portaudit-db. First, check whether there already is an entry for this vulnerability. If there were such entry, it would match the previous version of the package, 0.65_6: &prompt.user; packaudit &prompt.user; portaudit clamav-0.65_6 To run packaudit, you must have permission to write to its DATABASEDIR, typically /var/db/portaudit. If there is none found, you get the green light to add a new entry for this vulnerability. Now you can generate a brand-new UUID (assume it's 74a9541d-5d6c-11d8-80e3-0020ed76ef5a) and add your new entry to the VuXML database. Please verify its syntax after that as follows: &prompt.user; cd ${PORTSDIR}/security/vuxml && make validate You will need at least one of the following packages installed: textproc/libxml2, textproc/jade. Now rebuild the portaudit database from the VuXML file: &prompt.user; packaudit To verify that the <affected> section of your entry will match correct package(s), issue the following command: &prompt.user; portaudit -f /usr/ports/INDEX -r 74a9541d-5d6c-11d8-80e3-0020ed76ef5a Please refer to &man.portaudit.1; for better understanding of the command syntax. Make sure that your entry produces no spurious matches in the output. Now check whether the right package versions are matched by your entry: &prompt.user; portaudit clamav-0.65_6 clamav-0.65_7 Affected package: clamav-0.65_6 (matched by clamav<0.65_7) Type of problem: clamav remote denial-of-service. Reference: <http://www.freebsd.org/ports/portaudit/74a9541d-5d6c-11d8-80e3-0020ed76ef5a.html> 1 problem(s) found. Obviously, the former version should match while the latter one should not. Finally, verify whether the web page generated from the VuXML database looks like expected: &prompt.user; mkdir -p ~/public_html/portaudit &prompt.user; packaudit &prompt.user; lynx ~/public_html/portaudit/74a9541d-5d6c-11d8-80e3-0020ed76ef5a.html Dos and Don'ts Introduction Here is a list of common dos and don'ts that you encounter during the porting process. You should check your own port against this list, but you can also check ports in the PR database that others have submitted. Submit any comments on ports you check as described in Bug Reports and General Commentary. Checking ports in the PR database will both make it faster for us to commit them, and prove that you know what you are doing. <makevar>WRKDIR</makevar> Do not write anything to files outside WRKDIR. WRKDIR is the only place that is guaranteed to be writable during the port build (see installing ports from a CDROM for an example of building ports from a read-only tree). If you need to modify one of the pkg-* files, do so by redefining a variable, not by writing over it. <makevar>WRKDIRPREFIX</makevar> Make sure your port honors WRKDIRPREFIX. Most ports do not have to worry about this. In particular, if you are referring to a WRKDIR of another port, note that the correct location is WRKDIRPREFIXPORTSDIR/subdir/name/work not PORTSDIR/subdir/name/work or .CURDIR/../../subdir/name/work or some such. Also, if you are defining WRKDIR yourself, make sure you prepend ${WRKDIRPREFIX}${.CURDIR} in the front. Differentiating operating systems and OS versions You may come across code that needs modifications or conditional compilation based upon what version of Unix it is running under. If you need to make such changes to the code for conditional compilation, make sure you make the changes as general as possible so that we can back-port code to older FreeBSD systems and cross-port to other BSD systems such as 4.4BSD from CSRG, BSD/386, 386BSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. The preferred way to tell 4.3BSD/Reno (1990) and newer versions of the BSD code apart is by using the BSD macro defined in sys/param.h. Hopefully that file is already included; if not, add the code: #if (defined(__unix__) || defined(unix)) && !defined(USG) #include <sys/param.h> #endif to the proper place in the .c file. We believe that every system that defines these two symbols has sys/param.h. If you find a system that does not, we would like to know. Please send mail to the &a.ports;. Another way is to use the GNU Autoconf style of doing this: #ifdef HAVE_SYS_PARAM_H #include <sys/param.h> #endif Do not forget to add -DHAVE_SYS_PARAM_H to the CFLAGS in the Makefile for this method. Once you have sys/param.h included, you may use: #if (defined(BSD) && (BSD >= 199103)) to detect if the code is being compiled on a 4.3 Net2 code base or newer (e.g. FreeBSD 1.x, 4.3/Reno, NetBSD 0.9, 386BSD, BSD/386 1.1 and below). Use: #if (defined(BSD) && (BSD >= 199306)) to detect if the code is being compiled on a 4.4 code base or newer (e.g. FreeBSD 2.x, 4.4, NetBSD 1.0, BSD/386 2.0 or above). The value of the BSD macro is 199506 for the 4.4BSD-Lite2 code base. This is stated for informational purposes only. It should not be used to distinguish between versions of FreeBSD based only on 4.4-Lite vs. versions that have merged in changes from 4.4-Lite2. The __FreeBSD__ macro should be used instead. Use sparingly: __FreeBSD__ is defined in all versions of FreeBSD. Use it if the change you are making only affects FreeBSD. Porting gotchas like the use of sys_errlist[] vs strerror() are Berkeley-isms, not FreeBSD changes. In FreeBSD 2.x, __FreeBSD__ is defined to be 2. In earlier versions, it is 1. Later versions always bump it to match their major version number. If you need to tell the difference between a FreeBSD 1.x system and a FreeBSD 2.x or above system, usually the right answer is to use the BSD macros described above. If there actually is a FreeBSD specific change (such as special shared library options when using ld) then it is OK to use __FreeBSD__ and #if __FreeBSD__ > 1 to detect a FreeBSD 2.x and later system. If you need more granularity in detecting FreeBSD systems since 2.0-RELEASE you can use the following: #if __FreeBSD__ >= 2 #include <osreldate.h> # if __FreeBSD_version >= 199504 /* 2.0.5+ release specific code here */ # endif #endif In the hundreds of ports that have been done, there have only been one or two cases where __FreeBSD__ should have been used. Just because an earlier port screwed up and used it in the wrong place does not mean you should do so too. __FreeBSD_version values Here is a convenient list of __FreeBSD_version values as defined in sys/param.h: __FreeBSD_version values Value Date Release 119411 2.0-RELEASE 199501, 199503 March 19, 1995 2.1-CURRENT 199504 April 9, 1995 2.0.5-RELEASE 199508 August 26, 1995 2.2-CURRENT before 2.1 199511 November 10, 1995 2.1.0-RELEASE 199512 November 10, 1995 2.2-CURRENT before 2.1.5 199607 July 10, 1996 2.1.5-RELEASE 199608 July 12, 1996 2.2-CURRENT before 2.1.6 199612 November 15, 1996 2.1.6-RELEASE 199612 2.1.7-RELEASE 220000 February 19, 1997 2.2-RELEASE (not changed) 2.2.1-RELEASE (not changed) 2.2-STABLE after 2.2.1-RELEASE 221001 April 15, 1997 2.2-STABLE after texinfo-3.9 221002 April 30, 1997 2.2-STABLE after top 222000 May 16, 1997 2.2.2-RELEASE 222001 May 19, 1997 2.2-STABLE after 2.2.2-RELEASE 225000 October 2, 1997 2.2.5-RELEASE 225001 November 20, 1997 2.2-STABLE after 2.2.5-RELEASE 225002 December 27, 1997 2.2-STABLE after ldconfig -R merge 226000 March 24, 1998 2.2.6-RELEASE 227000 July 21, 1998 2.2.7-RELEASE 227001 July 21, 1998 2.2-STABLE after 2.2.7-RELEASE 227002 September 19, 1998 2.2-STABLE after &man.semctl.2; change 228000 November 29, 1998 2.2.8-RELEASE 228001 November 29, 1998 2.2-STABLE after 2.2.8-RELEASE 300000 February 19, 1996 3.0-CURRENT before &man.mount.2; change 300001 September 24, 1997 3.0-CURRENT after &man.mount.2; change 300002 June 2, 1998 3.0-CURRENT after &man.semctl.2; change 300003 June 7, 1998 3.0-CURRENT after ioctl arg changes 300004 September 3, 1998 3.0-CURRENT after ELF conversion 300005 October 16, 1998 3.0-RELEASE 300006 October 16, 1998 3.0-CURRENT after 3.0-RELEASE 300007 January 22, 1999 3.0-STABLE after 3/4 branch 310000 February 9, 1999 3.1-RELEASE 310001 March 27, 1999 3.1-STABLE after 3.1-RELEASE 310002 April 14, 1999 3.1-STABLE after C++ constructor/destructor order change 320000 3.2-RELEASE 320001 May 8, 1999 3.2-STABLE 320002 August 29, 1999 3.2-STABLE after binary-incompatible IPFW and socket changes 330000 September 2, 1999 3.3-RELEASE 330001 September 16, 1999 3.3-STABLE 330002 November 24, 1999 3.3-STABLE after adding &man.mkstemp.3; to libc 340000 December 5, 1999 3.4-RELEASE 340001 December 17, 1999 3.4-STABLE 350000 June 20, 2000 3.5-RELEASE 350001 July 12, 2000 3.5-STABLE 400000 January 22, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after 3.4 branch 400001 February 20, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after change in dynamic linker handling 400002 March 13, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after C++ constructor/destructor order change 400003 March 27, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after functioning &man.dladdr.3; 400004 April 5, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after __deregister_frame_info dynamic linker bug fix (also 4.0-CURRENT after EGCS 1.1.2 integration) 400005 April 27, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after &man.suser.9; API change (also 4.0-CURRENT after newbus) 400006 May 31, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after cdevsw registration change 400007 June 17, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after the addition of so_cred for socket level credentials 400008 June 20, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after the addition of a poll syscall wrapper to libc_r 400009 July 20, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after the change of the kernel's dev_t type to struct specinfo pointer 400010 September 25, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after fixing a hole in &man.jail.2; 400011 September 29, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after the sigset_t datatype change 400012 November 15, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after the cutover to the GCC 2.95.2 compiler 400013 December 4, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after adding pluggable linux-mode ioctl handlers 400014 January 18, 2000 4.0-CURRENT after importing OpenSSL 400015 January 27, 2000 4.0-CURRENT after the C++ ABI change in GCC 2.95.2 from -fvtable-thunks to -fno-vtable-thunks by default 400016 February 27, 2000 4.0-CURRENT after importing OpenSSH 400017 March 13, 2000 4.0-RELEASE 400018 March 17, 2000 4.0-STABLE after 4.0-RELEASE 400019 May 5, 2000 4.0-STABLE after the introduction of delayed checksums. 400020 June 4, 2000 4.0-STABLE after merging libxpg4 code into libc. 400021 July 8, 2000 4.0-STABLE after upgrading Binutils to 2.10.0, ELF branding changes, and tcsh in the base system. 410000 July 14, 2000 4.1-RELEASE 410001 July 29, 2000 4.1-STABLE after 4.1-RELEASE 410002 September 16, 2000 4.1-STABLE after &man.setproctitle.3; moved from libutil to libc. 411000 September 25, 2000 4.1.1-RELEASE 411001 4.1.1-STABLE after 4.1.1-RELEASE 420000 October 31, 2000 4.2-RELEASE 420001 January 10, 2001 4.2-STABLE after combining libgcc.a and libgcc_r.a, and associated GCC linkage changes. 430000 March 6, 2001 4.3-RELEASE 430001 May 18, 2001 4.3-STABLE after wint_t introduction. 430002 July 22, 2001 4.3-STABLE after PCI powerstate API merge. 440000 August 1, 2001 4.4-RELEASE 440001 October 23, 2001 4.4-STABLE after d_thread_t introduction. 440002 November 4, 2001 4.4-STABLE after mount structure changes (affects filesystem klds). 440003 December 18, 2001 4.4-STABLE after the userland components of smbfs were imported. 450000 December 20, 2001 4.5-RELEASE 450001 February 24, 2002 4.5-STABLE after the usb structure element rename. 450004 April 16, 2002 4.5-STABLE after the sendmail_enable &man.rc.conf.5; variable was made to take the value NONE. 450005 April 27, 2002 4.5-STABLE after moving to XFree86 4 by default for package builds. 450006 May 1, 2002 4.5-STABLE after accept filtering was fixed so that is no longer susceptible to an easy DoS. 460000 June 21, 2002 4.6-RELEASE 460001 June 21, 2002 4.6-STABLE &man.sendfile.2; fixed to comply with documentation, not to count any headers sent against the amount of data to be sent from the file. 460002 July 19, 2002 4.6.2-RELEASE 460100 June 26, 2002 4.6-STABLE 460101 June 26, 2002 4.6-STABLE after MFC of `sed -i'. 460102 September 1, 2002 4.6-STABLE after MFC of many new pkg_install features from the HEAD. 470000 October 8, 2002 4.7-RELEASE 470100 October 9, 2002 4.7-STABLE 470101 November 10, 2002 Start generated __std{in,out,err}p references rather than __sF. This changes std{in,out,err} from a compile time expression to a runtime one. 470102 January 23, 2003 4.7-STABLE after MFC of mbuf changes to replace m_aux mbufs by m_tag's 470103 February 14, 2003 4.7-STABLE gets OpenSSL 0.9.7 480000 March 30, 2003 4.8-RELEASE 480100 April 5, 2003 4.8-STABLE 480101 May 22, 2003 4.8-STABLE after &man.realpath.3; has been made thread-safe 480102 August 10, 2003 4.8-STABLE 3ware API changes to twe. 490000 October 27, 2003 4.9-RELEASE 490100 October 27, 2003 4.9-STABLE 490101 January 8, 2004 4.9-STABLE after e_sid was added to struct kinfo_eproc. 490102 February 4, 2004 4.9-STABLE after MFC of libmap functionality for rtld. 491000 May 25, 2004 4.10-RELEASE 491100 June 1, 2004 4.10-STABLE 491101 August 11, 2004 4.10-STABLE after MFC of revision 20040629 of the package tools 491102 November 16, 2004 4.10-STABLE after VM fix dealing with unwiring of fictitious pages 492000 December 17, 2004 4.11-RELEASE 492100 December 17, 2004 4.11-STABLE 492101 April 18, 2006 4.11-STABLE after adding libdata/ldconfig directories to mtree files. 500000 March 13, 2000 5.0-CURRENT 500001 April 18, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after adding addition ELF header fields, and changing our ELF binary branding method. 500002 May 2, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after kld metadata changes. 500003 May 18, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after buf/bio changes. 500004 May 26, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after binutils upgrade. 500005 June 3, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after merging libxpg4 code into libc and after TASKQ interface introduction. 500006 June 10, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after the addition of AGP interfaces. 500007 June 29, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after Perl upgrade to 5.6.0 500008 July 7, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after the update of KAME code to 2000/07 sources. 500009 July 14, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after ether_ifattach() and ether_ifdetach() changes. 500010 July 16, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after changing mtree defaults back to original variant, adding -L to follow symlinks. 500011 July 18, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after kqueue API changed. 500012 September 2, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after &man.setproctitle.3; moved from libutil to libc. 500013 September 10, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after the first SMPng commit. 500014 January 4, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after <sys/select.h> moved to <sys/selinfo.h>. 500015 January 10, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after combining libgcc.a and libgcc_r.a, and associated GCC linkage changes. 500016 January 24, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after change allowing libc and libc_r to be linked together, deprecating -pthread option. 500017 February 18, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after switch from struct ucred to struct xucred to stabilize kernel-exported API for mountd et al. 500018 February 24, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after addition of CPUTYPE make variable for controlling CPU-specific optimizations. 500019 June 9, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after moving machine/ioctl_fd.h to sys/fdcio.h 500020 June 15, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after locale names renaming. 500021 June 22, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after Bzip2 import. Also signifies removal of S/Key. 500022 July 12, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after SSE support. 500023 September 14, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after KSE Milestone 2. 500024 October 1, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after d_thread_t, and moving UUCP to ports. 500025 October 4, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after ABI change for descriptor and creds passing on 64 bit platforms. 500026 October 9, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after moving to XFree86 4 by default for package builds, and after the new libc strnstr() function was added. 500027 October 10, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after the new libc strcasestr() function was added. 500028 December 14, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after the userland components of smbfs were imported. (not changed) 5.0-CURRENT after the new C99 specific-width integer types were added. 500029 January 29, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after a change was made in the return value of &man.sendfile.2;. 500030 February 15, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after the introduction of the type fflags_t, which is the appropriate size for file flags. 500031 February 24, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after the usb structure element rename. 500032 March 16, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after the introduction of Perl 5.6.1. 500033 April 3, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after the sendmail_enable &man.rc.conf.5; variable was made to take the value NONE. 500034 April 30, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after mtx_init() grew a third argument. 500035 May 13, 2002 5.0-CURRENT with Gcc 3.1. 500036 May 17, 2002 5.0-CURRENT without Perl in /usr/src 500037 May 29, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after the addition of &man.dlfunc.3; 500038 July 24, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after the types of some struct sockbuf members were changed and the structure was reordered. 500039 September 1, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after GCC 3.2.1 import. Also after headers stopped using _BSD_FOO_T_ and started using _FOO_T_DECLARED. This value can also be used as a conservative estimate of the start of &man.bzip2.1; package support. 500040 September 20, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after various changes to disk functions were made in the name of removing dependency on disklabel structure internals. 500041 October 1, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after the addition of &man.getopt.long.3; to libc. 500042 October 15, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after Binutils 2.13 upgrade, which included new FreeBSD emulation, vec, and output format. 500043 November 1, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after adding weak pthread_XXX stubs to libc, obsoleting libXThrStub.so. 5.0-RELEASE. 500100 January 17, 2003 5.0-CURRENT after branching for RELENG_5_0 500101 February 19, 2003 <sys/dkstat.h> is empty and should not be included. 500102 February 25, 2003 5.0-CURRENT after the d_mmap_t interface change. 500103 February 26, 2003 5.0-CURRENT after taskqueue_swi changed to run without Giant, and taskqueue_swi_giant added to run with Giant. 500104 February 27, 2003 cdevsw_add() and cdevsw_remove() no longer exists. Appearance of MAJOR_AUTO allocation facility. 500105 March 4, 2003 5.0-CURRENT after new cdevsw initialization method. 500106 March 8, 2003 devstat_add_entry() has been replaced by devstat_new_entry() 500107 March 15, 2003 Devstat interface change; see sys/sys/param.h 1.149 500108 March 15, 2003 Token-Ring interface changes. 500109 March 25, 2003 Addition of vm_paddr_t. 500110 March 28, 2003 5.0-CURRENT after &man.realpath.3; has been made thread-safe 500111 April 9, 2003 5.0-CURRENT after &man.usbhid.3; has been synced with NetBSD 500112 April 17, 2003 5.0-CURRENT after new NSS implementation and addition of POSIX.1 getpw*_r, getgr*_r functions 500113 May 2, 2003 5.0-CURRENT after removal of the old rc system. 501000 June 4, 2003 5.1-RELEASE. 501100 June 2, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after branching for RELENG_5_1. 501101 June 29, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after correcting the semantics of sigtimedwait(2) and sigwaitinfo(2). 501102 July 3, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after adding the lockfunc and lockfuncarg fields to &man.bus.dma.tag.create.9;. 501103 July 31, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after GCC 3.3.1-pre 20030711 snapshot integration. 501104 August 5, 2003 5.1-CURRENT 3ware API changes to twe. 501105 August 17, 2003 5.1-CURRENT dynamically-linked /bin and /sbin support and movement of libraries to /lib. 501106 September 8, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after adding kernel support for Coda 6.x. 501107 September 17, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after 16550 UART constants moved from <dev/sio/sioreg.h> to <dev/ic/ns16550.h>. Also when libmap functionality was unconditionally supported by rtld. 501108 September 23, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after PFIL_HOOKS API update 501109 September 27, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after adding kiconv(3) 501110 September 28, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after changing default operations for open and close in cdevsw 501111 October 16, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after changed layout of cdevsw 501112 October 16, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after adding kobj multiple inheritance 501113 October 31, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after the if_xname change in struct ifnet 501114 November 16, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after changing /bin and /sbin to be dynamically linked 502000 December 7, 2003 5.2-RELEASE 502010 February 23, 2004 5.2.1-RELEASE 502100 December 7, 2003 5.2-CURRENT after branching for RELENG_5_2 502101 December 19, 2003 5.2-CURRENT after __cxa_atexit/__cxa_finalize functions were added to libc. 502102 January 30, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after change of default thread library from libc_r to libpthread. 502103 February 21, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after device driver API megapatch. 502104 February 25, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after getopt_long_only() addition. 502105 March 5, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after NULL is made into ((void *)0) for C, creating more warnings. 502106 March 8, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after pf is linked to the build and install. 502107 March 10, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after time_t is changed to a 64-bit value on sparc64. 502108 March 12, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after Intel C/C++ compiler support in some headers and execve(2) changes to be more strictly conforming to POSIX. 502109 March 22, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after the introduction of the bus_alloc_resource_any API 502110 March 27, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after the addition of UTF-8 locales 502111 April 11, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after the removal of the getvfsent(3) API 502112 April 13, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after the addition of the .warning directive for make. 502113 June 4, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after ttyioctl() was made mandatory for serial drivers. 502114 June 13, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after import of the ALTQ framework. 502115 June 14, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after changing sema_timedwait(9) to return 0 on success and a non-zero error code on failure. 502116 June 16, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after changing kernel dev_t to be pointer to struct cdev *. 502117 June 17, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after changing kernel udev_t to dev_t. 502118 June 17, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after adding support for CLOCK_VIRTUAL and CLOCK_PROF to clock_gettime(2) and clock_getres(2). 502119 June 22, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after changing network interface cloning overhaul. 502120 July 2, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after the update of the package tools to revision 20040629. 502121 July 9, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after marking Bluetooth code as non-i386 specific. 502122 July 11, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after the introduction of the KDB debugger framework, the conversion of DDB into a backend and the introduction of the GDB backend. 502123 July 12, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after change to make VFS_ROOT take a struct thread argument as does vflush. Struct kinfo_proc now has a user data pointer. The switch of the default X implementation to xorg was also made at this time. 502124 July 24, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after the change to separate the way ports rc.d and legacy scripts are started. 502125 July 28, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after the backout of the previous change. 502126 July 31, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after the removal of kmem_alloc_pageable() and the import of gcc 3.4.2. 502127 August 2, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after changing the UMA kernel API to allow ctors/inits to fail. 502128 August 8, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after the change of the vfs_mount signature as well as global replacement of PRISON_ROOT with SUSER_ALLOWJAIL for the suser(9) API. 503000 August 23, 2004 5.3-BETA/RC before the pfil API change 503001 September 22, 2004 5.3-RELEASE 503100 October 16, 2004 5.3-STABLE after branching for RELENG_5_3 503101 December 3, 2004 5.3-STABLE after addition of glibc style &man.strftime.3; padding options. 503102 February 13, 2005 5.3-STABLE after OpenBSD's nc(1) import MFC. 503103 February 27, 2005 5.4-PRERELEASE after the MFC of the fixes in <src/include/stdbool.h> and <src/sys/i386/include/_types.h> for using the GCC-compatibility of the Intel C/C++ compiler. 503104 February 28, 2005 5.4-PRERELEASE after the MFC of the change of ifi_epoch from wall clock time to uptime. 503105 March 2, 2005 5.4-PRERELEASE after the MFC of the fix of EOVERFLOW check in vswprintf(3). 504000 April 3, 2005 5.4-RELEASE. 504100 April 3, 2005 5.4-STABLE after branching for RELENG_5_4 504101 May 11, 2005 5.4-STABLE after increasing the default thread stacksizes 504102 June 24, 2005 5.4-STABLE after the addition of sha256 504103 October 3, 2005 5.4-STABLE after the MFC of if_bridge 504104 November 13, 2005 5.4-STABLE after the MFC of bsdiff and portsnap 504105 January 17, 2006 5.4-STABLE after MFC of ldconfig_local_dirs change. 505000 May 12, 2006 5.5-RELEASE. 505100 May 12, 2006 5.5-STABLE after branching for RELENG_5_5 600000 August 18, 2004 6.0-CURRENT 600001 August 27, 2004 6.0-CURRENT after permanently enabling PFIL_HOOKS in the kernel. 600002 August 30, 2004 6.0-CURRENT after initial addition of ifi_epoch to struct if_data. Backed out after a few days. Do not use this value. 600003 September 8, 2004 6.0-CURRENT after the re-addition of the ifi_epoch member of struct if_data. 600004 September 29, 2004 6.0-CURRENT after addition of the struct inpcb argument to the pfil API. 600005 October 5, 2004 6.0-CURRENT after addition of the "-d DESTDIR" argument to newsyslog. 600006 November 4, 2004 6.0-CURRENT after addition of glibc style &man.strftime.3; padding options. 600007 December 12, 2004 6.0-CURRENT after addition of 802.11 framework updates. 600008 January 25, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after changes to VOP_*VOBJECT() functions and introduction of MNTK_MPSAFE flag for Giantfree filesystems. 600009 February 4, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after addition of the cpufreq framework and drivers. 600010 February 6, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after importing OpenBSD's nc(1). 600011 February 12, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after removing semblance of SVID2 matherr() support. 600012 February 15, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after increase of default thread stacks' size. 600013 February 19, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after fixes in <src/include/stdbool.h> and <src/sys/i386/include/_types.h> for using the GCC-compatibility of the Intel C/C++ compiler. 600014 February 21, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after EOVERFLOW checks in vswprintf(3) fixed. 600015 February 25, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after changing the struct if_data member, ifi_epoch, from wall clock time to uptime. 600016 February 26, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after LC_CTYPE disk format changed. 600017 February 27, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after NLS catalogs disk format changed. 600018 February 27, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after LC_COLLATE disk format changed. 600019 February 28, 2005 Installation of acpica includes into /usr/include. 600020 March 9, 2005 Addition of MSG_NOSIGNAL flag to send(2) API. 600021 March 17, 2005 Addition of fields to cdevsw 600022 March 21, 2005 Removed gtar from base system. 600023 April 13, 2005 LOCAL_CREDS, LOCAL_CONNWAIT socket options added to unix(4). 600024 April 19, 2005 &man.hwpmc.4; and related tools added to 6.0-CURRENT. 600025 April 26, 2005 struct icmphdr added to 6.0-CURRENT. 600026 May 3, 2005 pf updated to 3.7. 600027 May 6, 2005 Kernel libalias and ng_nat introduced. 600028 May 13, 2005 POSIX ttyname_r(3) made available through unistd.h and libc. 600029 May 29, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after libpcap updated to v0.9.1 alpha 096. 600030 June 5, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after importing NetBSD's if_bridge(4). 600031 June 10, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after struct ifnet was broken out of the driver softcs. 600032 July 11, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after the import of libpcap v0.9.1. 600033 July 25, 2005 6.0-STABLE after bump of all shared library versions that had not been changed since RELENG_5. 600034 August 13, 2005 6.0-STABLE after credential argument is added to dev_clone event handler. 6.0-RELEASE. 600100 November 1, 2005 6.0-STABLE after 6.0-RELEASE 600101 December 21, 2005 6.0-STABLE after incorporating scripts from the local_startup directories into the base &man.rcorder.8;. 600102 December 30, 2005 6.0-STABLE after updating the ELF types and constants. 600103 January 15, 2006 6.0-STABLE after MFC of pidfile(3) API. 600104 January 17, 2006 6.0-STABLE after MFC of ldconfig_local_dirs change. 600105 February 26, 2006 6.0-STABLE after NLS catalog support of csh(1). 601000 May 6, 2006 6.1-RELEASE 601100 May 6, 2006 6.1-STABLE after 6.1-RELEASE. 601101 June 22, 2006 6.1-STABLE after the import of csup. 601102 July 11, 2006 6.1-STABLE after the iwi(4) update. 601103 July 17, 2006 6.1-STABLE after the resolver update to BIND9, and exposure of reentrant version of netdb functions. 601104 August 8, 2006 6.1-STABLE after DSO (dynamic shared objects) support has been enabled in OpenSSL. 601105 September 2, 2006 6.1-STABLE after 802.11 fixups changed the api for the IEEE80211_IOC_STA_INFO ioctl. 602000 November 15, 2006 6.2-RELEASE 602100 September 15, 2006 6.2-STABLE after 6.2-RELEASE. 602101 December 12, 2006 6.2-STABLE after the addition of Wi-Spy quirk. 602102 December 28, 2006 6.2-STABLE after pci_find_extcap() addition. 602103 January 16, 2007 6.2-STABLE after MFC of dlsym change to look for a requested symbol both in specified dso and its implicit dependencies. 602104 January 28, 2007 6.2-STABLE after MFC of ng_deflate(4) and ng_pred1(4) netgraph nodes and new compression and encryption modes for ng_ppp(4) node. 602105 February 20, 2007 6.2-STABLE after MFC of BSD licensed version of &man.gzip.1; ported from NetBSD. 602106 March 31, 2007 6.2-STABLE after MFC of PCI MSI and MSI-X support. 602107 April 6, 2007 6.2-STABLE after MFC of ncurses 5.6 and wide character support. 602108 April 11, 2007 6.2-STABLE after MFC of CAM 'SG' peripheral device, which implements a subset of Linux SCSI SG passthrough device API. 602109 April 17, 2007 6.2-STABLE after MFC of readline 5.2 patchset 002. 602110 May 2, 2007 6.2-STABLE after MFC of pmap_invalidate_cache(), pmap_change_attr(), pmap_mapbios(), pmap_mapdev_attr(), and pmap_unmapbios() for amd64 and i386. 602111 June 11, 2007 6.2-STABLE after MFC of BOP_BDFLUSH and caused breakage of the filesystem modules KBI. 602112 September 21, 2007 6.2-STABLE after libutil(3) MFC's. 602113 October 25, 2007 6.2-STABLE after MFC of wide and single byte ctype separation. Newly compiled binary that references to ctype.h may require a new symbol, __mb_sb_limit, which is not available on older systems. 602114 October 30, 2007 6.2-STABLE after ctype ABI forward compatibility restored. 602115 November 21, 2007 6.2-STABLE after back out of wide and single byte ctype separation. 603000 November 25, 2007 6.3-RELEASE 603100 November 25, 2007 6.3-STABLE after 6.3-RELEASE. 603101 December 7, 2007 6.3-STABLE after fixing multibyte type support in bit macro. 603102 April 24, 2008 6.3-STABLE after adding l_sysid to struct flock. 603103 May 27, 2008 6.3-STABLE after MFC of the memrchr function. 603104 June 15, 2008 6.3-STABLE after MFC of support for :u variable modifier in make(1). 604000 October 4, 2008 6.4-RELEASE 604100 October 4, 2008 6.4-STABLE after 6.4-RELEASE. 700000 July 11, 2005 7.0-CURRENT. 700001 July 23, 2005 7.0-CURRENT after bump of all shared library versions that had not been changed since RELENG_5. 700002 August 13, 2005 7.0-CURRENT after credential argument is added to dev_clone event handler. 700003 August 25, 2005 7.0-CURRENT after memmem(3) is added to libc. 700004 October 30, 2005 7.0-CURRENT after solisten(9) kernel arguments are modified to accept a backlog parameter. 700005 November 11, 2005 7.0-CURRENT after IFP2ENADDR() was changed to return a pointer to IF_LLADDR(). 700006 November 11, 2005 7.0-CURRENT after addition of if_addr member to struct ifnet and IFP2ENADDR() removal. 700007 December 2, 2005 7.0-CURRENT after incorporating scripts from the local_startup directories into the base &man.rcorder.8;. 700008 December 5, 2005 7.0-CURRENT after removal of MNT_NODEV mount option. 700009 December 19, 2005 7.0-CURRENT after ELF-64 type changes and symbol versioning. 700010 December 20, 2005 7.0-CURRENT after addition of hostb and vgapci drivers, addition of pci_find_extcap(), and changing the AGP drivers to no longer map the aperture. 700011 December 31, 2005 7.0-CURRENT after tv_sec was made time_t on all platforms but Alpha. 700012 January 8, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after ldconfig_local_dirs change. 700013 January 12, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after changes to /etc/rc.d/abi to support /compat/linux/etc/ld.so.cache being a symlink in a readonly filesystem. 700014 January 26, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after pts import. 700015 March 26, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after the introduction of version 2 of &man.hwpmc.4;'s ABI. 700016 April 22, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after addition of &man.fcloseall.3; to libc. 700017 May 13, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after removal of ip6fw. 700018 July 15, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after import of snd_emu10kx. 700019 July 29, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after import of OpenSSL 0.9.8b. 700020 September 3, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after addition of bus_dma_get_tag function 700021 September 4, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after libpcap 0.9.4 and tcpdump 3.9.4 import. 700022 September 9, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after dlsym change to look for a requested symbol both in specified dso and its implicit dependencies. 700023 September 23, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after adding new sound IOCTLs for the OSSv4 mixer API. 700024 September 28, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after import of OpenSSL 0.9.8d. 700025 November 11, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after the addition of libelf. 700026 November 26, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after major changes on sound sysctls. 700027 November 30, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after the addition of Wi-Spy quirk. 700028 December 15, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after the addition of sctp calls to libc 700029 January 26, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after the GNU &man.gzip.1; implementation was replaced with a BSD licensed version ported from NetBSD. 700030 February 7, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after the removal of IPIP tunnel encapsulation (VIFF_TUNNEL) from the IPv4 multicast forwarding code. 700031 February 23, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after the modification of bus_setup_intr() (newbus). 700032 March 2, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after the inclusion of ipw(4) and iwi(4) firmwares. 700033 March 9, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after the inclusion of ncurses wide character support. 700034 March 19, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after changes to how insmntque(), getnewvnode(), and vfs_hash_insert() work. 700035 March 26, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after addition of a notify mechanism for CPU frequency changes. 700036 April 6, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after import of the ZFS filesystem. 700037 April 8, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after addition of CAM 'SG' peripheral device, which implements a subset of Linux SCSI SG passthrough device API. 700038 April 30, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after changing &man.getenv.3;, &man.putenv.3;, &man.setenv.3; and &man.unsetenv.3; to be POSIX conformant. 700039 May 1, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after the changes in 700038 were backed out. 700040 May 10, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after the addition of &man.flopen.3; to libutil. 700041 May 13, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after enabling symbol versioning, and changing the default thread library to libthr. 700042 May 19, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after the import of gcc 4.2.0. 700043 May 21, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after bump of all shared library versions that had not been changed since RELENG_6. 700044 June 7, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after changing the argument for vn_open()/VOP_OPEN() from filedescriptor index to the struct file *. 700045 June 10, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after changing &man.pam.nologin.8; to provide an account management function instead of an authentication function to the PAM framework. 700046 June 11, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after updated 802.11 wireless support. 700047 June 11, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after adding TCP LRO interface capabilities. 700048 June 12, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after RFC 3678 API support added to the IPv4 stack. Legacy RFC 1724 behavior of the IP_MULTICAST_IF ioctl has now been removed; 0.0.0.0/8 may no longer be used to specify an interface index. struct ipmreqn should be used instead. 700049 July 3, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after importing pf from OpenBSD 4.1 (not changed) 7.0-CURRENT after adding IPv6 support for FAST_IPSEC, deleting KAME IPSEC, and renaming FAST_IPSEC to IPSEC. 700050 July 4, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after converting setenv/putenv/etc. calls from traditional BSD to POSIX. 700051 July 4, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after adding new mmap/lseek/etc syscalls. 700052 July 6, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after moving I4B headers to include/i4b. 700053 September 30, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after the addition of support for PCI domains 700054 October 25, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after MFC of wide and single byte ctype separation. 700055 October 28, 2007 7.0-RELEASE, and 7.0-CURRENT after ABI backwards compatibility to the FreeBSD 4/5/6 versions of the PCIOCGETCONF, PCIOCREAD and PCIOCWRITE IOCTLs was MFC'ed, which required the ABI of the PCIOCGETCONF IOCTL to be broken again 700100 December 22, 2007 7.0-STABLE after 7.0-RELEASE 700101 February 8, 2008 7.0-STABLE after the MFC of m_collapse(). 700102 March 30, 2008 7.0-STABLE after the MFC of kdb_enter_why(). 700103 April 10, 2008 7.0-STABLE after adding l_sysid to struct flock. 700104 April 11, 2008 7.0-STABLE after the MFC of procstat(1). 700105 April 11, 2008 7.0-STABLE after the MFC of umtx features. 700106 April 15, 2008 7.0-STABLE after the MFC of &man.write.2; support to &man.psm.4;. 700107 April 20, 2008 7.0-STABLE after the MFC of F_DUP2FD command to &man.fcntl.2;. 700108 May 5, 2008 7.0-STABLE after some &man.lockmgr.9; changes, which makes it necessary to include sys/lock.h in order to use &man.lockmgr.9;. 700109 May 27, 2008 7.0-STABLE after MFC of the memrchr function. 700110 August 5, 2008 7.0-STABLE after MFC of kernel NFS lockd client. 700111 August 20, 2008 7.0-STABLE after addition of physically contiguous jumbo frame support. 700112 August 27, 2008 7.0-STABLE after MFC of kernel DTrace support. 701000 November 25, 2008 7.1-RELEASE 701100 November 25, 2008 7.1-STABLE after 7.1-RELEASE. 701101 January 10, 2009 7.1-STABLE after strndup merge. 701102 January 17, 2009 7.1-STABLE after cpuctl(4) support added. 701103 February 7, 2009 7.1-STABLE after the merge of multi-/no-IPv4/v6 jails. 701104 February 14, 2009 7.1-STABLE after the store of the suspension owner in the struct mount, and introduction of vfs_susp_clean method into the struct vfsops. 701105 March 12, 2009 7.1-STABLE after the incompatible change to the kern.ipc.shmsegs sysctl to allow to allocate larger SysV shared memory segments on 64bit architectures. 701106 March 14, 2009 7.1-STABLE after the merge of a fix for POSIX semaphore wait operations. 702000 April 15, 2009 7.2-RELEASE 702100 April 15, 2009 7.2-STABLE after 7.2-RELEASE. 702101 May 15, 2009 7.2-STABLE after ichsmb(4) was changed to use left-adjusted slave addressing to match other SMBus controller drivers. 702102 May 28, 2009 7.2-STABLE after MFC of the fdopendir function. 702103 June 06, 2009 7.2-STABLE after MFC of PmcTools. 702104 July 14, 2009 7.2-STABLE after MFC of the closefrom system call. 702105 July 31, 2009 7.2-STABLE after MFC of the SYSVIPC ABI change. 702106 September 14, 2009 7.2-STABLE after MFC of the x86 PAT enhancements and addition of d_mmap_single() and the scatter/gather list VM object type. 703000 February 9, 2010 7.3-RELEASE 703100 February 9, 2010 7.3-STABLE after 7.3-RELEASE. 800000 October 11, 2007 8.0-CURRENT. Separating wide and single byte ctype. 800001 October 16, 2007 8.0-CURRENT after libpcap 0.9.8 and tcpdump 3.9.8 import. 800002 October 21, 2007 8.0-CURRENT after renaming kthread_create() and friends to kproc_create() etc. 800003 October 24, 2007 8.0-CURRENT after ABI backwards compatibility to the FreeBSD 4/5/6 versions of the PCIOCGETCONF, PCIOCREAD and PCIOCWRITE IOCTLs was added, which required the ABI of the PCIOCGETCONF IOCTL to be broken again 800004 November 12, 2007 8.0-CURRENT after agp(4) driver moved from src/sys/pci to src/sys/dev/agp 800005 December 4, 2007 8.0-CURRENT after changes to the jumbo frame allocator. 800006 December 7, 2007 8.0-CURRENT after the addition of callgraph capture functionality to &man.hwpmc.4;. 800007 December 25, 2007 8.0-CURRENT after kdb_enter() gains a "why" argument. 800008 December 28, 2007 8.0-CURRENT after LK_EXCLUPGRADE option removal. 800009 January 9, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after introduction of &man.lockmgr.disown.9; 800010 January 10, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the &man.vn.lock.9; prototype change. 800011 January 13, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the &man.VOP.LOCK.9; and &man.VOP.UNLOCK.9; prototype changes. 800012 January 19, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after introduction of &man.lockmgr.recursed.9;, &man.BUF.RECURSED.9; and &man.BUF.ISLOCKED.9; and the removal of BUF_REFCNT(). 800013 January 23, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after introduction of the ASCII encoding. 800014 January 24, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after changing the prototype of &man.lockmgr.9; and removal of lockcount() and LOCKMGR_ASSERT(). 800015 January 26, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after extending the types of the &man.fts.3; structures. 800016 February 1, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after adding an argument to MEXTADD(9) 800017 February 6, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the introduction of LK_NODUP and LK_NOWITNESS options in the &man.lockmgr.9; space. 800018 February 8, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the addition of m_collapse. 800019 February 9, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the addition of current working directory, root directory, and jail directory support to the kern.proc.filedesc sysctl. 800020 February 13, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after introduction of &man.lockmgr.assert.9; and BUF_ASSERT functions. 800021 February 15, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after introduction of &man.lockmgr.args.9; and LK_INTERNAL flag removal. 800022 (backed out) 8.0-CURRENT after changing the default system ar to BSD &man.ar.1;. 800023 February 25, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after changing the prototypes of &man.lockstatus.9; and &man.VOP.ISLOCKED.9;, more specifically retiring the struct thread argument. 800024 March 1, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after axing out the lockwaiters and BUF_LOCKWAITERS functions, changing the return value of brelvp from void to int and introducing new flags for &man.lockinit.9;. 800025 March 8, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after adding F_DUP2FD command to &man.fcntl.2;. 800026 March 12, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after changing the priority parameter to cv_broadcastpri such that 0 means no priority. 800027 March 24, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after changing the bpf monitoring ABI when zerocopy bpf buffers were added. 800028 March 26, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after adding l_sysid to struct flock. 800029 March 28, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after reintegration of the BUF_LOCKWAITERS function and the addition of &man.lockmgr.waiters.9;. 800030 April 1, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the introduction of the &man.rw.try.rlock.9; and &man.rw.try.wlock.9; functions. 800031 April 6, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the introduction of the lockmgr_rw and lockmgr_args_rw functions. 800032 April 8, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the implementation of the openat and related syscalls, introduction of the O_EXEC flag for the &man.open.2;, and providing the corresponding linux compatibility syscalls. 800033 April 8, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after added &man.write.2; support for &man.psm.4; in native operation level. Now arbitrary commands can be written to /dev/psm%d and status can be read back from it. 800034 April 10, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after introduction of the memrchr function. 800035 April 16, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after introduction of the fdopendir function. 800036 April 20, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after switchover of 802.11 wireless to multi-bss support (aka vaps). 800037 May 9, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after addition of multi routing table support (a.k.a. setfib(1), setfib(2)). 800038 May 26, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after removal of netatm and ISDN4BSD. 800039 June 14, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after removal of sgtty. 800040 June 26, 2008 8.0-CURRENT with kernel NFS lockd client. 800041 July 22, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after addition of arc4random_buf(3) and arc4random_uniform(3). 800042 August 8, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after addition of cpuctl(4). 800043 August 13, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after changing bpf(4) to use a single device node, instead of device cloning. 800044 August 17, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the commit of the first step of the vimage project renaming global variables to be virtualized with a V_ prefix with macros to map them back to their global names. 800045 August 20, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the integration of the MPSAFE TTY layer, including changes to various drivers and utilities that interact with it. 800046 September 8, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the separation of the GDT per CPU on amd64 architecture. 800047 September 10, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after removal of VSVTX, VSGID and VSUID. 800048 September 16, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after converting the kernel NFS mount code to accept individual mount options in the nmount() iovec, not just one big struct nfs_args. 800049 September 17, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the removal of &man.suser.9; and &man.suser.cred.9;. 800050 October 20, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after buffer cache API change. 800051 October 23, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the removal of the &man.MALLOC.9; and &man.FREE.9; macros. 800052 October 28, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the introduction of accmode_t and renaming of VOP_ACCESS 'a_mode' argument to 'a_accmode'. 800053 November 2, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the prototype change of &man.vfs.busy.9; and the introduction of its MBF_NOWAIT and MBF_MNTLSTLOCK flags. 800054 November 22, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the addition of buf_ring, memory barriers and ifnet functions to facilitate multiple hardware transmit queues for cards that support them, and a lockless ring-buffer implementation to enable drivers to more efficiently manage queuing of packets. 800055 November 27, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the addition of Intel™ Core, Core2, and Atom support to &man.hwpmc.4;. 800056 November 29, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the introduction of multi-/no-IPv4/v6 jails. 800057 December 1, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the switch to the ath hal source code. 800058 December 12, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the introduction of the VOP_VPTOCNP operation. 800059 December 15, 2008 8.0-CURRENT incorporates the new arp-v2 rewrite. 800060 December 19, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the addition of makefs. 800061 January 15, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after TCP Appropriate Byte Counting. 800062 January 28, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after removal of minor(), minor2unit(), unit2minor(), etc. 800063 February 18, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after GENERIC config change to use the USB2 stack, but also the addition of fdevname(3). 800064 February 23, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after the USB2 stack is moved to and replaces dev/usb. 800065 February 26, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after the renaming of all functions in libmp(3). 800066 February 27, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after changing USB devfs handling and layout. 800067 February 28, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after adding getdelim(), getline(), stpncpy(), strnlen(), wcsnlen(), wcscasecmp(), and wcsncasecmp(). 800068 March 2, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after renaming the ushub devclass to uhub. 800069 March 9, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after libusb20.so.1 was renamed to libusb.so.1. 800070 March 9, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after merging IGMPv3 and Source-Specific Multicast (SSM) to the IPv4 stack. 800071 March 14, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after gcc was patched to use C99 inline semantics in c99 and gnu99 mode. 800072 March 15, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after the IFF_NEEDSGIANT flag has been removed; non-MPSAFE network device drivers are no longer supported. 800073 March 18, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after the dynamic string token substitution has been implemented for rpath and needed pathes. 800074 March 24, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after tcpdump 4.0.0 and libpcap 1.0.0 import. 800075 April 6, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after layout of structs vnet_net, vnet_inet and vnet_ipfw has been changed. 800076 April 9, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after adding delay profiles in dummynet. 800077 April 14, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after removing VOP_LEASE() and vop_vector.vop_lease. 800078 April 15, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after struct rt_weight fields have been added to struct rt_metrics and struct rt_metrics_lite, changing the layout of struct rt_metrics_lite. A bump to RTM_VERSION was made, but backed out. 800079 April 15, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after struct llentry pointers are added to struct route and struct route_in6. 800080 April 15, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after layout of struct inpcb has been changed. 800081 April 19, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after the layout of struct malloc_type has been changed. 800082 April 21, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after the layout of struct ifnet has changed, and with if_ref() and if_rele() ifnet refcounting. 800083 April 22, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after the implementation of a low-level Bluetooth HCI API. 800084 April 29, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after IPv6 SSM and MLDv2 changes. 800085 April 30, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after enabling support for VIMAGE kernel builds with one active image. 800086 May 8, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after adding support for input lines of arbitrarily length in patch(1). 800087 May 11, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after some VFS KPI changes. The thread argument has been removed from the FSD parts of the VFS. VFS_* functions do not need the context any more because it always refers to curthread. In some special cases, the old behavior is retained. 800088 May 20, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after net80211 monitor mode changes. 800089 May 23, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after adding UDP control block support. 800090 May 23, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after virtualizing interface cloning. 800091 May 27, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after adding hierarchical jails and removing global securelevel. 800092 May 29, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after chaning sx_init_flags() KPI. The SX_ADAPTIVESPIN is retired and a new SX_NOADAPTIVE flag is introduced in order to handle the reversed logic. 800093 May 29, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after adding mnt_xflag to struct mount. 800094 May 30, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after adding &man.VOP.ACCESSX.9;. 800095 May 30, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after changing the polling KPI. The polling handlers now return the number of packets processed. A new IFCAP_POLLING_NOCOUNT is also introduced to specify that the return value is not significant and the counting should be skipped. 800096 June 1, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after updating to the new netisr implementation and after changing the way we store and access FIBs. 800097 June 8, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after the introduction of vnet destructor hooks and infrastructure. 800097 June 11, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after the introduction of netgraph outbound to inbound path call detection and queuing, which also changed the layout of struct thread. 800098 June 14, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after OpenSSL 0.9.8k import. 800099 June 22, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after NGROUPS update and moving route virtualization into its own VImage module. 800100 June 24, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after SYSVIPC ABI change. 800101 June 29, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after the removal of the /dev/net/* per-interface character devices. 800102 July 12, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after padding was added to struct sackhint, struct tcpcb, and struct tcpstat. 800103 July 13, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after replacing struct tcpopt with struct toeopt in the TOE driver interface to the TCP syncache. 800104 July 14, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after the addition of the linker-set based per-vnet allocator. 800105 July 19, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after version bump for all shared libraries that do not have symbol versioning turned on. 800106 July 24, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after introduction of OBJT_SG VM object type. 800107 August 2, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after making the newbus subsystem Giant free by adding the newbus sxlock and 8.0-RELEASE. 800108 November 21, 2009 8.0-STABLE after implementing EVFILT_USER kevent filter. 800500 January 7, 2010 8.0-STABLE after __FreeBSD_version bump to make pkg_add -r use packages-8-stable. 800501 January 24, 2010 8.0-STABLE after change of the scandir(3) and alphasort(3) prototypes to conform to SUSv4. 800502 January 31, 2010 8.0-STABLE after addition of sigpause(3). 800503 February 25, 2010 8.0-STABLE after addition of SIOCGIFDESCR and SIOCSIFDESCR ioctls to network interfaces. These ioctl can be used to manipulate interface description, as inspired by OpenBSD. + + 800504 + March 1, 2010 + 8.0-STABLE after MFC of importing x86emu, a software + emulator for real mode x86 CPU from OpenBSD. + 900000 August 22, 2009 9.0-CURRENT. 900001 September 8, 2009 9.0-CURRENT after importing x86emu, a software emulator for real mode x86 CPU from OpenBSD. 900002 September 23, 2009 9.0-CURRENT after implementing the EVFILT_USER kevent filter functionality. 900003 December 2, 2009 9.0-CURRENT after addition of sigpause(3) and PIE support in csu. 900004 December 6, 2009 9.0-CURRENT after addition of libulog and its libutempter compatibility interface. 900005 December 12, 2009 9.0-CURRENT after addition of sleepq_sleepcnt(), which can be used to query the number of waiters on a specific waiting queue. 900006 January 4, 2010 9.0-CURRENT after change of the scandir(3) and alphasort(3) prototypes to conform to SUSv4. 900007 January 13, 2010 9.0-CURRENT after the removal of utmp(5) and the addition of utmpx (see getutxent(3)) for improved logging of user logins and system events. 900008 January 20, 2010 9.0-CURRENT after the import of BSDL bc/dc and the deprecation of GNU bc/dc. 900009 January 26, 2010 9.0-CURRENT after the addition of SIOCGIFDESCR and SIOCSIFDESCR ioctls to network interfaces. These ioctl can be used to manipulate interface description, as inspired by OpenBSD.
Note that 2.2-STABLE sometimes identifies itself as 2.2.5-STABLE after the 2.2.5-RELEASE. The pattern used to be year followed by the month, but we decided to change it to a more straightforward major/minor system starting from 2.2. This is because the parallel development on several branches made it infeasible to classify the releases simply by their real release dates. If you are making a port now, you do not have to worry about old -CURRENTs; they are listed here just for your reference. Writing something after <filename>bsd.port.mk</filename> Do not write anything after the .include <bsd.port.mk> line. It usually can be avoided by including bsd.port.pre.mk somewhere in the middle of your Makefile and bsd.port.post.mk at the end. You need to include either the bsd.port.pre.mk/bsd.port.post.mk pair or bsd.port.mk only; do not mix these two usages. bsd.port.pre.mk only defines a few variables, which can be used in tests in the Makefile, bsd.port.post.mk defines the rest. Here are some important variables defined in bsd.port.pre.mk (this is not the complete list, please read bsd.port.mk for the complete list). Variable Description ARCH The architecture as returned by uname -m (e.g., i386) OPSYS The operating system type, as returned by uname -s (e.g., FreeBSD) OSREL The release version of the operating system (e.g., 2.1.5 or 2.2.7) OSVERSION The numeric version of the operating system; the same as __FreeBSD_version. PORTOBJFORMAT The object format of the system (elf or aout; note that for modern versions of FreeBSD, aout is deprecated.) LOCALBASE The base of the local tree (e.g., /usr/local/) PREFIX Where the port installs itself (see more on PREFIX). If you have to define the variables USE_IMAKE, USE_X_PREFIX, or MASTERDIR, do so before including bsd.port.pre.mk. Here are some examples of things you can write after bsd.port.pre.mk: # no need to compile lang/perl5 if perl5 is already in system .if ${OSVERSION} > 300003 BROKEN= perl is in system .endif # only one shlib version number for ELF .if ${PORTOBJFORMAT} == "elf" TCL_LIB_FILE= ${TCL_LIB}.${SHLIB_MAJOR} .else TCL_LIB_FILE= ${TCL_LIB}.${SHLIB_MAJOR}.${SHLIB_MINOR} .endif # software already makes link for ELF, but not for a.out post-install: .if ${PORTOBJFORMAT} == "aout" ${LN} -sf liblinpack.so.1.0 ${PREFIX}/lib/liblinpack.so .endif You did remember to use tab instead of spaces after BROKEN= and TCL_LIB_FILE=, did you not? :-). Use the <function>exec</function> statement in wrapper scripts If the port installs a shell script whose purpose is to launch another program, and if launching that program is the last action performed by the script, make sure to launch the program using the exec statement, for instance: #!/bin/sh exec %%LOCALBASE%%/bin/java -jar %%DATADIR%%/foo.jar "$@" The exec statement replaces the shell process with the specified program. If exec is omitted, the shell process remains in memory while the program is executing, and needlessly consumes system resources. Do things rationally The Makefile should do things simply and reasonably. If you can make it a couple of lines shorter or more readable, then do so. Examples include using a make .if construct instead of a shell if construct, not redefining do-extract if you can redefine EXTRACT* instead, and using GNU_CONFIGURE instead of CONFIGURE_ARGS += --prefix=${PREFIX}. If you find yourself having to write a lot of new code to try to do something, please go back and review bsd.port.mk to see if it contains an existing implementation of what you are trying to do. While hard to read, there are a great many seemingly-hard problems for which bsd.port.mk already provides a shorthand solution. Respect both <makevar>CC</makevar> and <makevar>CXX</makevar> The port should respect both CC and CXX variables. What we mean by this is that the port should not set the values of these variables absolutely, overriding existing values; instead, it should append whatever values it needs to the existing values. This is so that build options that affect all ports can be set globally. If the port does not respect these variables, please add NO_PACKAGE=ignores either cc or cxx to the Makefile. An example of a Makefile respecting both CC and CXX variables follows. Note the ?=: CC?= gcc CXX?= g++ Here is an example which respects neither CC nor CXX variables: CC= gcc CXX= g++ Both CC and CXX variables can be defined on FreeBSD systems in /etc/make.conf. The first example defines a value if it was not previously set in /etc/make.conf, preserving any system-wide definitions. The second example clobbers anything previously defined. Respect <makevar>CFLAGS</makevar> The port should respect the CFLAGS variable. What we mean by this is that the port should not set the value of this variable absolutely, overriding the existing value; instead, it should append whatever values it needs to the existing value. This is so that build options that affect all ports can be set globally. If it does not, please add NO_PACKAGE=ignores cflags to the Makefile. An example of a Makefile respecting the CFLAGS variable follows. Note the +=: CFLAGS+= -Wall -Werror Here is an example which does not respect the CFLAGS variable: CFLAGS= -Wall -Werror The CFLAGS variable is defined on FreeBSD systems in /etc/make.conf. The first example appends additional flags to the CFLAGS variable, preserving any system-wide definitions. The second example clobbers anything previously defined. You should remove optimization flags from the third party Makefiles. System CFLAGS contains system-wide optimization flags. An example from an unmodified Makefile: CFLAGS= -O3 -funroll-loops -DHAVE_SOUND Using system optimization flags, the Makefile would look similar to the following example: CFLAGS+= -DHAVE_SOUND Threading libraries The threading library must be linked to the binaries using a special linker flag -pthread on &os;. If a port insists on linking -lpthread or -lc_r directly, patch it to use PTHREAD_LIBS variable provided by the ports framework. This variable usually has the value of -pthread, but on certain architectures and &os; versions it can have different values, so do not just hardcode -pthread into patches and always use PTHREAD_LIBS. If building the port errors out with unrecognized option '-pthread' when setting PTHREAD_LIBS, it may be desirable to use gcc as linker by setting CONFIGURE_ENV to LD=${CC}. The -pthread option is not supported by ld directly. Feedback Do send applicable changes/patches to the original author/maintainer for inclusion in next release of the code. This will only make your job that much easier for the next release. <filename>README.html</filename> Do not include the README.html file. This file is not part of the cvs collection but is generated using the make readme command. Marking a port not installable with <makevar>BROKEN</makevar>, <makevar>FORBIDDEN</makevar>, or <makevar>IGNORE</makevar> In certain cases users should be prevented from installing a port. To tell a user that a port should not be installed, there are several make variables that can be used in a port's Makefile. The value of the following make variables will be the reason that is given back to users for why the port refuses to install itself. Please use the correct make variable as each make variable conveys radically different meanings to both users, and to automated systems that depend on the Makefiles, such as the ports build cluster, FreshPorts, and portsmon. Variables BROKEN is reserved for ports that currently do not compile, install, or deinstall correctly. It should be used for ports where the problem is believed to be temporary. If instructed, the build cluster will still attempt to try to build them to see if the underlying problem has been resolved. (However, in general, the cluster is run without this.) For instance, use BROKEN when a port: does not compile fails its configuration or installation process installs files outside of ${LOCALBASE} does not remove all its files cleanly upon deinstall (however, it may be acceptable, and desirable, for the port to leave user-modified files behind) FORBIDDEN is used for ports that do contain a security vulnerability or induce grave concern regarding the security of a FreeBSD system with a given port installed (ex: a reputably insecure program or a program that provides easily exploitable services). Ports should be marked as FORBIDDEN as soon as a particular piece of software has a vulnerability and there is no released upgrade. Ideally ports should be upgraded as soon as possible when a security vulnerability is discovered so as to reduce the number of vulnerable FreeBSD hosts (we like being known for being secure), however sometimes there is a noticeable time gap between disclosure of a vulnerability and an updated release of the vulnerable software. Do not mark a port FORBIDDEN for any reason other than security. IGNORE is reserved for ports that should not be built for some other reason. It should be used for ports where the problem is believed to be structural. The build cluster will not, under any circumstances, build ports marked as IGNORE. For instance, use IGNORE when a port: compiles but does not run properly does not work on the installed version of &os; requires &os; kernel sources to build, but the user does not have them installed has a distfile which may not be automatically fetched due to licensing restrictions does not work with some other currently installed port (for instance, the port depends on www/apache21 but www/apache13 is installed) If a port would conflict with a currently installed port (for example, if they install a file in the same place that perfoms a different function), use CONFLICTS instead. CONFLICTS will set IGNORE by itself. If a port should be marked IGNORE only on certain architectures, there are two other convenience variables that will automatically set IGNORE for you: ONLY_FOR_ARCHS and NOT_FOR_ARCHS. Examples: ONLY_FOR_ARCHS= i386 amd64 NOT_FOR_ARCHS= alpha ia64 sparc64 A custom IGNORE message can be set using ONLY_FOR_ARCHS_REASON and NOT_FOR_ARCHS_REASON. Per architecture entries are possible with ONLY_FOR_ARCHS_REASON_ARCH and NOT_FOR_ARCHS_REASON_ARCH. If a port fetches i386 binaries and installs them, IA32_BINARY_PORT should be set. If this variable is set, it will be checked whether the /usr/lib32 directory is available for IA32 versions of libraries and whether the kernel has IA32 compatibility compiled in. If one of these two dependencies is not satisfied, IGNORE will be set automatically. Implementation Notes The strings should not be quoted. Also, the wording of the string should be somewhat different due to the way the information is shown to the user. Examples: BROKEN= this port is unsupported on FreeBSD 5.x IGNORE= is unsupported on FreeBSD 5.x resulting in the following output from make describe: ===> foobar-0.1 is marked as broken: this port is unsupported on FreeBSD 5.x. ===> foobar-0.1 is unsupported on FreeBSD 5.x. Marking a port for removal with <makevar>DEPRECATED</makevar> or <makevar>EXPIRATION_DATE</makevar> Do remember that BROKEN and FORBIDDEN are to be used as a temporary resort if a port is not working. Permanently broken ports should be removed from the tree entirely. When it makes sense to do so, users can be warned about a pending port removal with DEPRECATED and EXPIRATION_DATE. The former is simply a string stating why the port is scheduled for removal; the latter is a string in ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD). Both will be shown to the user. It is possible to set DEPRECATED without an EXPIRATION_DATE (for instance, recommending a newer version of the port), but the converse does not make any sense. There is no set policy on how much notice to give. Current practice seems to be one month for security-related issues and two months for build issues. This also gives any interested committers a little time to fix the problems. Avoid use of the <literal>.error</literal> construct The correct way for a Makefile to signal that the port can not be installed due to some external factor (for instance, the user has specified an illegal combination of build options) is to set a nonblank value to IGNORE. This value will be formatted and shown to the user by make install. It is a common mistake to use .error for this purpose. The problem with this is that many automated tools that work with the ports tree will fail in this situation. The most common occurrence of this is seen when trying to build /usr/ports/INDEX (see ). However, even more trivial commands such as make -V maintainer also fail in this scenario. This is not acceptable. How to avoid using <literal>.error</literal> Assume that someone has the line USE_POINTYHAT=yes in make.conf. The first of the next two Makefile snippets will cause make index to fail, while the second one will not: .if USE_POINTYHAT .error "POINTYHAT is not supported" .endif .if USE_POINTYHAT IGNORE=POINTYHAT is not supported .endif Usage of <filename>sysctl</filename> The usage of sysctl is discouraged except in targets. This is because the evaluation of any makevars, such as used during make index, then has to run the command, further slowing down that process. Usage of &man.sysctl.8; should always be done with the SYSCTL variable, as it contains the fully qualified path and can be overridden, if one has such a special need. Rerolling distfiles Sometimes the authors of software change the content of released distfiles without changing the file's name. You have to verify that the changes are official and have been performed by the author. It has happened in the past that the distfile was silently altered on the download servers with the intent to cause harm or compromise end user security. Put the old distfile aside, download the new one, unpack them and compare the content with &man.diff.1;. If you see nothing suspicious, you can update distinfo. Be sure to summarize the differences in your PR or commit log, so that other people know that you have taken care to ensure that nothing bad has happened. You might also want to contact the authors of the software and confirm the changes with them. Necessary workarounds Sometimes it is necessary to work around bugs in software included with older versions of &os;. Some versions of &man.make.1; were broken on at least 4.8 and 5.0 with respect to handling comparisons based on OSVERSION. This would often lead to failures during make describe (and thus, the overall ports make index). The workaround is to enclose the conditional comparison in spaces, e.g.: if ( ${OSVERSION} > 500023 ) Be aware that test-installing a port on 4.9 or 5.2 will not detect this problem. Miscellanea The files pkg-descr and pkg-plist should each be double-checked. If you are reviewing a port and feel they can be worded better, do so. Do not copy more copies of the GNU General Public License into our system, please. Please be careful to note any legal issues! Do not let us illegally distribute software! A Sample <filename>Makefile</filename> Here is a sample Makefile that you can use to create a new port. Make sure you remove all the extra comments (ones between brackets)! It is recommended that you follow this format (ordering of variables, empty lines between sections, etc.). This format is designed so that the most important information is easy to locate. We recommend that you use portlint to check the Makefile. [the header...just to make it easier for us to identify the ports.] # New ports collection makefile for: xdvi [the "version required" line is only needed when the PORTVERSION variable is not specific enough to describe the port.] # Date created: 26 May 1995 [this is the person who did the original port to FreeBSD, in particular, the person who wrote the first version of this Makefile. Remember, this should not be changed when upgrading the port later.] # Whom: Satoshi Asami <asami@FreeBSD.org> # # $FreeBSD$ [ ^^^^^^^^^ This will be automatically replaced with RCS ID string by CVS when it is committed to our repository. If upgrading a port, do not alter this line back to "$FreeBSD$". CVS deals with it automatically.] # [section to describe the port itself and the master site - PORTNAME and PORTVERSION are always first, followed by CATEGORIES, and then MASTER_SITES, which can be followed by MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR. PKGNAMEPREFIX and PKGNAMESUFFIX, if needed, will be after that. Then comes DISTNAME, EXTRACT_SUFX and/or DISTFILES, and then EXTRACT_ONLY, as necessary.] PORTNAME= xdvi PORTVERSION= 18.2 CATEGORIES= print [do not forget the trailing slash ("/")! if you are not using MASTER_SITE_* macros] MASTER_SITES= ${MASTER_SITE_XCONTRIB} MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR= applications PKGNAMEPREFIX= ja- DISTNAME= xdvi-pl18 [set this if the source is not in the standard ".tar.gz" form] EXTRACT_SUFX= .tar.Z [section for distributed patches -- can be empty] PATCH_SITES= ftp://ftp.sra.co.jp/pub/X11/japanese/ PATCHFILES= xdvi-18.patch1.gz xdvi-18.patch2.gz [maintainer; *mandatory*! This is the person who is volunteering to handle port updates, build breakages, and to whom a users can direct questions and bug reports. To keep the quality of the Ports Collection as high as possible, we no longer accept new ports that are assigned to "ports@FreeBSD.org".] MAINTAINER= asami@FreeBSD.org COMMENT= A DVI Previewer for the X Window System [dependencies -- can be empty] RUN_DEPENDS= gs:${PORTSDIR}/print/ghostscript LIB_DEPENDS= Xpm.5:${PORTSDIR}/graphics/xpm [this section is for other standard bsd.port.mk variables that do not belong to any of the above] [If it asks questions during configure, build, install...] IS_INTERACTIVE= yes [If it extracts to a directory other than ${DISTNAME}...] WRKSRC= ${WRKDIR}/xdvi-new [If the distributed patches were not made relative to ${WRKSRC}, you may need to tweak this] PATCH_DIST_STRIP= -p1 [If it requires a "configure" script generated by GNU autoconf to be run] GNU_CONFIGURE= yes [If it requires GNU make, not /usr/bin/make, to build...] USE_GMAKE= yes [If it is an X application and requires "xmkmf -a" to be run...] USE_IMAKE= yes [et cetera.] [non-standard variables to be used in the rules below] MY_FAVORITE_RESPONSE= "yeah, right" [then the special rules, in the order they are called] pre-fetch: i go fetch something, yeah post-patch: i need to do something after patch, great pre-install: and then some more stuff before installing, wow [and then the epilogue] .include <bsd.port.mk> Keeping Up The &os; Ports Collection is constantly changing. Here is some information on how to keep up. FreshPorts One of the easiest ways to learn about updates that have already been committed is by subscribing to FreshPorts. You can select multiple ports to monitor. Maintainers are strongly encouraged to subscribe, because they will receive notification of not only their own changes, but also any changes that any other &os; committer has made. (These are often necessary to keep up with changes in the underlying ports framework—although it would be most polite to receive an advance heads-up from those committing such changes, sometimes this is overlooked or just simply impractical. Also, in some cases, the changes are very minor in nature. We expect everyone to use their best judgement in these cases.) If you wish to use FreshPorts, all you need is an account. If your registered email address is @FreeBSD.org, you will see the opt-in link on the right hand side of the webpages. For those of you who already have a FreshPorts account, but are not using your @FreeBSD.org email address, just change your email to @FreeBSD.org, subscribe, then change it back again. FreshPorts also has a sanity test feature which automatically tests each commit to the FreeBSD ports tree. If subscribed to this service, you will be notified of any errors which FreshPorts detects during sanity testing of your commits. The Web Interface to the Source Repository It is possible to browse the files in the source repository by using a web interface. Changes that affect the entire port system are now documented in the CHANGES file. Changes that affect individual ports are now documented in the UPDATING file. However, the definitive answer to any question is undoubtedly to read the source code of bsd.port.mk, and associated files. The &os; Ports Mailing List If you maintain ports, you should consider following the &a.ports;. Important changes to the way ports work will be announced there, and then committed to CHANGES. The &os; Port Building Cluster on <hostid role="hostname">pointyhat.FreeBSD.org</hostid> One of the least-publicized strengths of &os; is that an entire cluster of machines is dedicated to continually building the Ports Collection, for each of the major OS releases and for each Tier-1 architecture. You can find the results of these builds at package building logs and errors. Individual ports are built unless they are specifically marked with IGNORE. Ports that are marked with BROKEN will still be attempted, to see if the underlying problem has been resolved. (This is done by passing TRYBROKEN to the port's Makefile.) The &os; Ports Distfile Scanner The build cluster is dedicated to building the latest release of each port with distfiles that have already been fetched. However, as the Internet continually changes, distfiles can quickly go missing. The FreeBSD Ports distfile scanner attempts to query every download site for every port to find out if each distfile is still currently available. Maintainers are asked to check this report periodically, not only to speed up the building process for users, but to help avoid wasting bandwidth of the sites that volunteer to host all these distfiles. The &os; Ports Monitoring System Another handy resource is the FreeBSD Ports Monitoring System (also known as portsmon). This system comprises a database that processes information from several sources and allows its to be browsed via a web interface. Currently, the ports Problem Reports (PRs), the error logs from the build cluster, and individual files from the ports collection are used. In the future, this will be expanded to include the distfile survey, as well as other sources. To get started, you can view all information about a particular port by using the Overview of One Port. As of this writing, this is the only resource available that maps GNATS PR entries to portnames. (PR submitters do not always include the portname in their Synopsis, although we would prefer that they did.) So, portsmon is a good place to start if you want to find out whether an existing port has any PRs filed against it and/or any build errors; or, to find out if a new port that you may be thinking about creating has already been submitted.