Trawling The FreeBSD Ports Collection

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Trawling The FreeBSD Ports Collection

• Shanker Balan
• Exocore Consulting
• Bangalore
• http//shankerbalan.com/

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Introduction

• FreeBSD is a source based distribution
• Everything in FreeBSD system is built from base
  (/usr/src)
• Kernel, libc, GCC tool chain, Sendmail are all
  base
• Contributed applications are knows as ports
  (/usr/ports)
• Applications not part of base are installed
  from ports

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Overview of Software Installation

• Traditional way of installing 3rd party software
  under UNIX
• wget http//gaim.sf.net/gaim-0.72.tar.bz2
• tar jxvf gaim-0.72.tar.bz2
• less INSTALL ./configure make
• make test make install
• And the FreeBSD way...
• Install from packages
• Install from ports
• Over 9200 applications are available this was

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What is a package?

• A package is like an RPM or a DEB
• Single file which must be downloaded from the
  site
• Contains pre-compiled copies of all the
  applications, as well as cfg files, doc etc
• Dependency information for the application
• To install a package from ftp.freebsd.org
• pkg_add -r bash

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What is a port?

• root cd /usr/ports ls
• devel/ audio/ multimedia/ x11/ mail/ www/ net/
• root cd mail/ ls
• postfix/ mutt/ qmail/ evolution/ fetchmail/
  procmail/
• root cd postfix/ ls
• Makefile files/ pkg-install pkg-plist
• distinfo pkg-descr pkg-message scripts/

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Ports (contd)

• Each port contains patches necessary to compile
  and run the original application on BSD
• Do make build in the port directory to compile
  the application
• The Makefile will fetch the src code from FTP
  or local disk
• Unpack, apply patches and compile it
• Do make install to install the application.
• make package will create a binary package for
  the port

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Ports Vs Packages

• Package Benefits
• Compressed package is typically smaller than a
  compressed source tarball
• Mozilla, GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice take a long time
  (and disk space) to compile
• Packages do not require compilation knowledge
• Ports Benefits
• Some people dont trust binary distributions
• Can tweak the compilation process for CPU (-march
  athlon) and compiler optimizations (-O2)

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Ports Benefits (contd)

• User definable ./configure options. Compile
  only the features you want to reduce dependencies
  (See portname/Makefile)
• Build Gaim without GNOME support
• Build Ghostscript w/o X11 support
• Easy to apply local patchsets and build
  applications

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Finding Your Application

• Find the latest ported apps at
• http//freshports.org
• http//www.freebsd.org/ports/
• Or locally using keywords
• cd /usr/ports
• make search namebash
• make search keyftp

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Updating the ports collection

• The CVSup Method
• CVSup is a network distribution method for CVS
  repositories
• Install net/cvsup
• Copy /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile to
  /root
• Edit ports-supfile and set it to use the closest
  cvsup server
• Run cvsup -g /root/ports-supfile
• /usr/ports will now be updated with all the
  recent changes

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Upgrading Ports

• Using portupgrade
• Install sysutils/portupgrade
• portupgrade -a -i
• Specify compile time options in
  /usr/local/etc/pkgtools.conf
• MAKE_ARGS
• 'mail/evolution'gt'WITHOUT_PILOTyes',
• 'net/gaim' gt 'WITHOUT_GNOMEyes',
• 'emulators/wine' gt 'DEBUGyes',

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Resources

• The FreeBSD Hanbook
• http//www.freebsd.org/doc/
• Manual pages
• portupgrade(1)
• ports(7)
• pkg_add(1)

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Questions?

• Thank You
• Shanker Balan
• Exocore Consulting
• Bangalore
• http//shankerbalan.com/