On Sep 13, 2013, at 7:05 AM, Patrick Doyle wrote: > I feel like I should have the proper skills to contribute a patch for a > broken port, but I am lacking even the first clue as to where to start. > > I just tried installing the gcl (GNU Common Lisp) port and it failed. > Following the instructions on the wiki, I have filed ticket #40468. > > Suppose I wanted to contribute a patch to fix this problem myself. Where > would I start? Illustrating the amount of my cluelessness: > > 1) Where would I learn how MacPorts builds packages from a portfile?
You might start here: http://guide.macports.org/#development The man pages can be helpful: man port macports.conf portfile portgroup portstyle porthier > 2) Do I edit patches & the portfile in place on my /opt filesystem, or can I > build a port from within my own source tree? Either will work. If you work in /opt consider switching from rsync to svn to preserve your work: http://guide.macports.org/#installing.macports.subversion See item 3 in above link. https://trac.macports.org/wiki/howto/SyncingWithSVN > 3) If you found that a particular port didn't build, what would you do first? # Start clean for complete log port clean <port name> port build <port name> port log <port name> > 4) If you found that the port didn't build because of some (possibly obscure) > autoconf problem, what would you do? Develop a patch of the Portfile and/or sources, open a trac ticket and attach the patch. > Perhaps the first place I could start would be to write up a wiki page > describing how to fix broken ports. Would that be of use? Yes, or if one exists possibly improve it. Thank you for your interest in contributing. Regards, Bradley Giesbrecht (pixilla) _______________________________________________ macports-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users
