The pkgsrc guide

Table of Contents

1. What is pkgsrc?

1.1. Introduction

1.1.1. Why pkgsrc?

1.1.2. Supported platforms

1.2. Overview

1.3. Terminology

1.3.1. Roles involved in pkgsrc

1.4. Typography

I. The pkgsrc user's guide

2. Where to get pkgsrc and how to keep it up-to-date

2.1. Getting pkgsrc for the first time

2.1.1. As tar file

2.1.2. Via SUP

2.1.3. Via anonymous CVS

2.2. Keeping pkgsrc up-to-date

2.2.1. Via tar files

2.2.2. Via CVS

3. Using pkgsrc on systems other than NetBSD

3.1. Binary distribution

3.2. Bootstrapping pkgsrc

3.3. Platform-specific notes

3.3.1. Darwin (Mac OS X)

3.3.2. FreeBSD

3.3.3. Interix

3.3.4. IRIX

3.3.5. Linux

3.3.6. OpenBSD

3.3.7. Solaris

4. Using pkgsrc

4.1. Using binary packages

4.1.1. Finding binary packages

4.1.2. Installing binary packages

4.1.3. Deinstalling packages

4.1.4. Getting information about installed packages

4.1.5. Checking for security vulnerabilities in installed packages

4.1.6. Finding if newer versions of your installed packages are in pkgsrc

4.1.7. Other administrative functions

4.1.8. A word of warning

4.2. Building packages from source

4.2.1. Requirements

4.2.2. Fetching distfiles

4.2.3. How to build and install

5. Configuring pkgsrc

5.1. General configuration

5.2. Variables affecting the build process

5.3. Selecting and configuring the compiler

5.3.1. Selecting the compiler

5.3.2. Additional flags to the compiler (CFLAGS)

5.3.3. Additional flags to the linker (LDFLAGS)

5.4. Developer/advanced settings

5.5. Selecting Build Options

6. Creating binary packages

6.1. Building a single binary package

6.2. Settings for creation of binary packages

6.3. Doing a bulk build of all packages

6.3.1. Configuration

6.3.2. Other environmental considerations

6.3.3. Operation

6.3.4. What it does

6.3.5. Disk space requirements

6.3.6. Setting up a sandbox for chrooted builds

6.3.7. Building a partial set of packages

6.3.8. Uploading results of a bulk build

6.4. Creating a multiple CD-ROM packages collection

6.4.1. Example of cdpack

7. Directory layout of the installed files

7.1. File system layout in ${LOCALBASE}

7.2. File system layout in ${VARBASE}

8. Frequently Asked Questions

8.1. Are there any mailing lists for pkg-related discussion?

8.2. Where's the pkgviews documentation?

8.3. Utilities for package management (pkgtools)

8.4. How to use pkgsrc as non-root

8.5. How to resume transfers when fetching distfiles?

8.6. How can I install/use XFree86 from pkgsrc?

8.7. How can I install/use X.org from pkgsrc?

8.8. How to fetch files from behind a firewall

8.9. How do I tell make fetch to do passive FTP?

8.10. How to fetch all distfiles at once

8.11. What does “Don't know how to make /usr/share/tmac/tmac.andoc” mean?

8.12. What does “Could not find bsd.own.mk” mean?

8.13. Using 'sudo' with pkgsrc

8.14. How do I change the location of configuration files?

8.15. Automated security checks

8.16. Why do some packages ignore my CFLAGS?

8.17. A package does not build. What shall I do?

8.18. What does “Makefile appears to contain unresolved cvs/rcs/??? merge conflicts” mean?

II. The pkgsrc developer's guide

9. Creating a new pkgsrc package from scratch

9.1. Common types of packages

9.1.1. Perl modules

9.1.2. KDE applications

9.2. Examples

9.2.1. How the www/nvu package came into pkgsrc

10. Package components - files, directories and contents

10.1. Makefile

10.2. distinfo

10.3. patches/*

10.3.1. Structure of a single patch file

10.3.2. Creating patch files

10.3.3. Sources where the patch files come from

10.3.4. Patching guidelines

10.3.5. Feedback to the author

10.4. Other mandatory files

10.5. Optional files

10.5.1. Files affecting the binary package

10.5.2. Files affecting the build process

10.5.3. Files affecting nothing at all

10.6. work*

10.7. files/*

11. Programming in Makefiles

11.1. Caveats

11.2. Makefile variables

11.2.1. Naming conventions

11.3. Code snippets

11.3.1. Adding things to a list

11.3.2. Converting an internal list into an external list

11.3.3. Passing variables to a shell command

11.3.4. Quoting guideline

11.3.5. Workaround for a bug in BSD Make

12. PLIST issues

12.1. RCS ID

12.2. Semi-automatic PLIST generation

12.3. Tweaking output of make print-PLIST

12.4. Variable substitution in PLIST

12.5. Man page compression

12.6. Changing PLIST source with PLIST_SRC

12.7. Platform-specific and differing PLISTs

12.8. Sharing directories between packages

13. Buildlink methodology

13.1. Converting packages to use buildlink3

13.2. Writing buildlink3.mk files

13.2.1. Anatomy of a buildlink3.mk file

13.2.2. Updating BUILDLINK_API_DEPENDS.pkg in buildlink3.mk files

13.3. Writing builtin.mk files

13.3.1. Anatomy of a builtin.mk file

13.3.2. Global preferences for native or pkgsrc software

14. The pkginstall framework

14.1. Files and directories outside the installation prefix

14.1.1. Directory manipulation

14.1.2. File manipulation

14.2. Configuration files

14.2.1. How PKG_SYSCONFDIR is set

14.2.2. Telling the software where configuration files are

14.2.3. Patching installations

14.2.4. Disabling handling of configuration files

14.3. System startup scripts

14.3.1. Disabling handling of system startup scripts

14.4. System users and groups

14.5. System shells

14.5.1. Disabling shell registration

14.6. Fonts

14.6.1. Disabling automatic update of the fonts databases

15. Options handling

15.1. Global default options

15.2. Converting packages to use bsd.options.mk

15.3. Option Names

16. The build process

16.1. Introduction

16.2. Program location

16.3. Directories used during the build process

16.4. Running a phase

16.5. The fetch phase

16.5.1. What to fetch and where to get it from

16.5.2. How are the files fetched?

16.6. The checksum phase

16.7. The extract phase

16.8. The patch phase

16.9. The tools phase

16.10. The wrapper phase

16.11. The configure phase

16.12. The build phase

16.13. The test phase

16.14. The install phase

16.15. The package phase

16.16. Cleaning up

16.17. Other helpful targets

17. Tools needed for building or running

17.1. Tools for pkgsrc builds

17.2. Tools needed by packages

17.3. Tools provided by platforms

17.4. Questions regarding the tools

18. Making your package work

18.1. General operation

18.1.1. Portability of packages

18.1.2. How to pull in user-settable variables from mk.conf

18.1.3. User interaction

18.1.4. Handling licenses

18.1.5. Restricted packages

18.1.6. Handling dependencies

18.1.7. Handling conflicts with other packages

18.1.8. Packages that cannot or should not be built

18.1.9. Packages which should not be deleted, once installed

18.1.10. Handling packages with security problems

18.1.11. How to handle incrementing versions when fixing an existing package

18.1.12. Substituting variable text in the package files (the SUBST framework)

18.2. Fixing problems in the fetch phase

18.2.1. Packages whose distfiles aren't available for plain downloading

18.2.2. How to handle modified distfiles with the 'old' name

18.3. Fixing problems in the configure phase

18.3.1. Shared libraries - libtool

18.3.2. Using libtool on GNU packages that already support libtool

18.3.3. GNU Autoconf/Automake

18.4. Programming languages

18.4.1. C, C++, and Fortran

18.4.2. Java

18.4.3. Packages containing perl scripts

18.4.4. Other programming languages

18.5. Fixing problems in the build phase

18.5.1. Compiling C and C++ code conditionally

18.5.2. How to handle compiler bugs

18.5.3. Undefined reference to “...”

18.5.4. Running out of memory

18.6. Fixing problems in the install phase

18.6.1. Creating needed directories

18.6.2. Where to install documentation

18.6.3. Installing highscore files

18.6.4. Packages with hardcoded paths to other interpreters

18.6.5. Packages installing perl modules

18.6.6. Packages installing info files

18.6.7. Packages installing man pages

18.6.8. Packages installing GConf2 data files

18.6.9. Packages installing scrollkeeper data files

18.6.10. Packages installing X11 fonts

18.6.11. Packages installing GTK2 modules

18.6.12. Packages installing SGML or XML data

18.6.13. Packages installing extensions to the MIME database

18.6.14. Packages using intltool

18.6.15. Packages installing startup scripts

18.6.16. Packages installing TeX modules

18.6.17. Packages supporting running binaries in emulation

18.6.18. Packages installing hicolor theme icons

18.6.19. Packages installing desktop files

18.7. Marking packages as having problems

19. Debugging

20. Submitting and Committing

20.1. Submitting binary packages

20.2. Submitting source packages (for non-NetBSD-developers)

20.3. General notes when adding, updating, or removing packages

20.4. Committing: Importing a package into CVS

20.5. Updating a package to a newer version

20.6. Moving a package in pkgsrc

21. Frequently Asked Questions

22. GNOME packaging and porting

22.1. Meta packages

22.2. Packaging a GNOME application

22.3. Updating GNOME to a newer version

22.4. Patching guidelines

III. The pkgsrc infrastructure internals

23. Design of the pkgsrc infrastructure

23.1. The meaning of variable definitions

23.2. Avoiding problems before they arise

23.3. Variable evaluation

23.3.1. At load time

23.3.2. At runtime

23.4. How can variables be specified?

23.5. Designing interfaces for Makefile fragments

23.5.1. Procedures with parameters

23.5.2. Actions taken on behalf of parameters

23.6. The order in which files are loaded

23.6.1. The order in bsd.prefs.mk

23.6.2. The order in bsd.pkg.mk

24. Regression tests

24.1. The regression tests framework

24.2. Running the regression tests

24.3. Adding a new regression test

24.3.1. Overridable functions

24.3.2. Helper functions

25. Porting pkgsrc

25.1. Porting pkgsrc to a new operating system

25.2. Adding support for a new compiler

A. A simple example package: bison

A.1. files

A.1.1. Makefile

A.1.2. DESCR

A.1.3. PLIST

A.1.4. Checking a package with pkglint

A.2. Steps for building, installing, packaging

B. Build logs

B.1. Building figlet

B.2. Packaging figlet

C. Directory layout of the pkgsrc FTP server

C.1. bootstrap-pkgsrc: Bootstrap kits

C.2. distfiles: The distributed source files

C.3. iso: Currently empty

C.4. misc: Miscellaneous things

C.5. packages*: Binary packages

C.6. current, pkgsrc-200xQy: source packages

D. Editing guidelines for the pkgsrc guide

D.1. Make targets

D.2. Procedure