it would be better to use ${LOCALBASE} for this, rather than hardcoding /usr/local.

what is creating the libpkgconf-dev package? it appears from lib/libpkgconfig/Makefile that you are putting this in the pkgconf package, not libpkgconf.

I thought this is the place that creates the libpkgconf-dev package; I used prior art to implement this, and haven't been able to verify this part as I haven't been able to convert my systems to pkgbase for testing yet (https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/pkgbasify/issues/46). Glad for any pointers.

I think this solves it; is it the right way?
bapt also reported this at https://ron-dev.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/src/pulls/9 btw.

packages are created implicitly by putting things in them, so when you say PACKAGE=foo in a Makefile, you get a foo package. you can also create packages in mtree, but this is almost always wrong, because a package that only contains a directory isn't normally useful. (i.e., you still include the package tag, but it should reference a package that is already created somewhere else.)

right now, your Makefile will give you pkgconf, pkgconf-dev, and pkgconf-dbg. since the development files are in pkgconf-dev, that's probably also what you want to put in mtree.

if you want the runtime libraries to be in a different package, you can set LIB_PACKAGE= in the libpkgconf Makefile to create pkgconf-lib. whether this is a good idea depends on the package... if you expect a lot of things to link to libpkgconfig, it's useful to put it in its own package, but if the only thing likely to use it is pkgconf itself, there's no point.

yep, this looks fine.

I wonder if it is allowed to compile-in the LOCALBASE value anywhere into base. This makes it impossible to later adjust sysctl user.localbase and build packages for such a system without also recompiling base.

# sysctl -W user
user.localbase: /usr/local

# sysctl -T user
user.localbase: /usr/local

I'd never noticed that. It does not look to me like the ports tree references user.localbase ( grep -r scan used, starting at / ). But the system does in various places.

I used lib/libpam/libpam/Makefile, which does CFLAGS+= -DLOCALBASE=\"${LOCALBASE:U/usr/local}\", as inspiration when preparing the import of pkgconf. It looks like it is used to locate the configuration files and modules for OpenPAM there.

I did not know about the user.localbase sysctl either; we could consider modifying pkgconf to use e.g., getlocalbase(3) from libutil to detect the right path at run-time.

Another option would be to not install pkgconf anymore, and restrict it to being a build tool until a better solution can be found.

Using getlocalbase(3) at runtime would be ideal but is not a trivial change. Take a look at how certctl(8) does it.