On Dec 7, 2007, at 7:41 AM, Paul Schmehl wrote:
--On Friday, December 07, 2007 00:18:15 -0500 Alex Goncharov <alex-
[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Alex Goncharov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
I won't dispute the word "beauty" here -- I like the system very
much.
But coming from some eight years of using Debian, I am still
mystified
about the underling mechanics of ports.
Your answers definitely help -- thank you!
I'm not sure about you, but I rather like not having 5~10 variants of
the same package for every single option available at build-time :).
Any time you see USE_FOO= bar in a Makefile, the answer to what
does that mean will be in /usr/ports/Mk/ somewhere. So grep
USE_FOO in /usr/ports/Mk/* and you'll find where it appears. Then
you can read the file and usually figure out what that means. You
may then have to go read Makefiles for the ports to which it refers
(in the case of cdrtools, cdrecord) and try to figure out why
*that* port is required for "your" port to build.
As maintainers, the first thing we have to do is read the
requirements for the software and make sure those dependencies are
built as well. So, for example, if a new port I'm working on
requires that libdir is installed, I have to figure out whether it
is or not, and if not, how I get it installed. Whenever possible,
we try to use the port macros (USE_FOO), but if not, we have to use
BUILD_DEPENDS to require that some other port is installed before
ours begins the build.
Correct. The option was required at build-time and is a requirement
for running the package (RUN_DEPENDS), which means that unfortunately
it's required for installation too.
There are some wonderfully talented and highly knowledgeable people
working behind the scenes to make sure all this stuff works in
harmony, so I don't ask why, I just make sure my ports work as
expected.
Indeed. There's a lot of work put in by a lot of pkg/ports
maintainers to ensure that stuff works out of the box with as little
work / maintenance knowledge on the end-user portion as possible, and
in the long run not having to keep track of a billion different
options and/or other 'useless' information is the correct way to go
IMHO.
--
Paul Schmehl ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Senior Information Security Analyst
The University of Texas at Dallas
http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/security/
Cheers,
-Garrett
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