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 archive

2.1.2. 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

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

4.2. 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. Variables affecting the installation process

5.4. Selecting and configuring the compiler

5.4.1. Selecting the compiler

5.4.2. Additional flags to the compiler (CFLAGS)

5.4.3. Additional flags to the linker (LDFLAGS)

5.5. Developer/advanced settings

5.6. Selecting Build Options

6. Creating binary packages

6.1. Building a single binary package

6.2. Settings for creation of binary packages

7. Creating binary packages for everything in pkgsrc (bulk builds)

7.1. Preparations

7.2. Running a pbulk-style bulk build

7.2.1. Configuration

7.3. Requirements of a full bulk build

7.4. Creating a multiple CD-ROM packages collection

7.4.1. Example of cdpack

8. Directory layout of the installed files

8.1. File system layout in ${LOCALBASE}

8.2. File system layout in ${VARBASE}

9. Frequently Asked Questions

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

9.2. Utilities for package management (pkgtools)

9.3. How to use pkgsrc as non-root

9.4. How to resume transfers when fetching distfiles?

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

9.6. How to fetch files from behind a firewall

9.7. How to fetch files from HTTPS sites

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

9.9. How to fetch all distfiles at once

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

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

9.12. Using 'sudo' with pkgsrc

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

9.14. Automated security checks

9.15. Why do some packages ignore my CFLAGS?

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

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

II. The pkgsrc developer's guide

10. Creating a new pkgsrc package from scratch

10.1. Common types of packages

10.1.1. Perl modules

10.1.2. KDE3 & KDE4 applications

10.1.3. Python modules and programs

10.2. Examples

10.2.1. How the www/nvu package came into pkgsrc

11. Package components - files, directories and contents

11.1. Makefile

11.2. distinfo

11.3. patches/*

11.3.1. Structure of a single patch file

11.3.2. Creating patch files

11.3.3. Sources where the patch files come from

11.3.4. Patching guidelines

11.3.5. Feedback to the author

11.4. Other mandatory files

11.5. Optional files

11.5.1. Files affecting the binary package

11.5.2. Files affecting the build process

11.5.3. Files affecting nothing at all

11.6. work*

11.7. files/*

12. Programming in Makefiles

12.1. Caveats

12.2. Makefile variables

12.2.1. Naming conventions

12.3. Code snippets

12.3.1. Adding things to a list

12.3.2. Echoing a string exactly as-is

12.3.3. Passing CFLAGS to GNU configure scripts

12.3.4. Handling possibly empty variables

13. PLIST issues

13.1. RCS ID

13.2. Semi-automatic PLIST generation

13.3. Tweaking output of make print-PLIST

13.4. Variable substitution in PLIST

13.5. Man page compression

13.6. Changing PLIST source with PLIST_SRC

13.7. Platform-specific and differing PLISTs

13.8. Build-specific PLISTs

13.9. Sharing directories between packages

14. Buildlink methodology

14.1. Converting packages to use buildlink3

14.2. Writing buildlink3.mk files

14.2.1. Anatomy of a buildlink3.mk file

14.2.2. Updating BUILDLINK_API_DEPENDS.pkg and BUILDLINK_ABI_DEPENDS.pkg in buildlink3.mk files

14.3. Writing builtin.mk files

14.3.1. Anatomy of a builtin.mk file

14.3.2. Global preferences for native or pkgsrc software

15. The pkginstall framework

15.1. Files and directories outside the installation prefix

15.1.1. Directory manipulation

15.1.2. File manipulation

15.2. Configuration files

15.2.1. How PKG_SYSCONFDIR is set

15.2.2. Telling the software where configuration files are

15.2.3. Patching installations

15.2.4. Disabling handling of configuration files

15.3. System startup scripts

15.3.1. Disabling handling of system startup scripts

15.4. System users and groups

15.5. System shells

15.5.1. Disabling shell registration

15.6. Fonts

15.6.1. Disabling automatic update of the fonts databases

16. Options handling

16.1. Global default options

16.2. Converting packages to use bsd.options.mk

16.3. Option Names

16.4. Determining the options of dependencies

17. The build process

17.1. Introduction

17.2. Program location

17.3. Directories used during the build process

17.4. Running a phase

17.5. The fetch phase

17.5.1. What to fetch and where to get it from

17.5.2. How are the files fetched?

17.6. The checksum phase

17.7. The extract phase

17.8. The patch phase

17.9. The tools phase

17.10. The wrapper phase

17.11. The configure phase

17.12. The build phase

17.13. The test phase

17.14. The install phase

17.15. The package phase

17.16. Cleaning up

17.17. Other helpful targets

18. Tools needed for building or running

18.1. Tools for pkgsrc builds

18.2. Tools needed by packages

18.3. Tools provided by platforms

19. Making your package work

19.1. General operation

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

19.1.2. User interaction

19.1.3. Handling licenses

19.1.4. Restricted packages

19.1.5. Handling dependencies

19.1.6. Handling conflicts with other packages

19.1.7. Packages that cannot or should not be built

19.1.8. Packages which should not be deleted, once installed

19.1.9. Handling packages with security problems

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

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

19.2. The fetch phase

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

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

19.2.3. Packages hosted on github.com

19.3. The configure phase

19.3.1. Shared libraries - libtool

19.3.2. Using libtool on GNU packages that already support libtool

19.3.3. GNU Autoconf/Automake

19.4. Programming languages

19.4.1. C, C++, and Fortran

19.4.2. Java

19.4.3. Packages containing perl scripts

19.4.4. Packages containing shell scripts

19.4.5. Other programming languages

19.5. The build phase

19.5.1. Compiling C and C++ code conditionally

19.5.2. How to handle compiler bugs

19.5.3. Undefined reference to “...”

19.5.4. Running out of memory

19.6. The install phase

19.6.1. Creating needed directories

19.6.2. Where to install documentation

19.6.3. Installing highscore files

19.6.4. Adding DESTDIR support to packages

19.6.5. Packages with hardcoded paths to other interpreters

19.6.6. Packages installing perl modules

19.6.7. Packages installing info files

19.6.8. Packages installing man pages

19.6.9. Packages installing GConf data files

19.6.10. Packages installing scrollkeeper/rarian data files

19.6.11. Packages installing X11 fonts

19.6.12. Packages installing GTK2 modules

19.6.13. Packages installing SGML or XML data

19.6.14. Packages installing extensions to the MIME database

19.6.15. Packages using intltool

19.6.16. Packages installing startup scripts

19.6.17. Packages installing TeX modules

19.6.18. Packages supporting running binaries in emulation

19.6.19. Packages installing hicolor theme icons

19.6.20. Packages installing desktop files

19.7. Marking packages as having problems

20. Debugging

21. Submitting and Committing

21.1. Submitting binary packages

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

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

21.4. Committing: Adding a package to CVS

21.5. Updating a package to a newer version

21.6. Renaming a package in pkgsrc

21.7. Moving a package in pkgsrc

22. Frequently Asked Questions

23. GNOME packaging and porting

23.1. Meta packages

23.2. Packaging a GNOME application

23.3. Updating GNOME to a newer version

23.4. Patching guidelines

III. The pkgsrc infrastructure internals

24. Design of the pkgsrc infrastructure

24.1. The meaning of variable definitions

24.2. Avoiding problems before they arise

24.3. Variable evaluation

24.3.1. At load time

24.3.2. At runtime

24.4. How can variables be specified?

24.5. Designing interfaces for Makefile fragments

24.5.1. Procedures with parameters

24.5.2. Actions taken on behalf of parameters

24.6. The order in which files are loaded

24.6.1. The order in bsd.prefs.mk

24.6.2. The order in bsd.pkg.mk

25. Regression tests

25.1. Running the regression tests

25.2. Adding a new regression test

25.2.1. Overridable functions

25.2.2. Helper functions

26. Porting pkgsrc

26.1. Porting pkgsrc to a new operating system

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. distfiles: The distributed source files

C.2. misc: Miscellaneous things

C.3. packages: Binary packages

C.4. reports: Bulk build reports

C.5. current, pkgsrc-20xxQy: source packages

D. Editing guidelines for the pkgsrc guide

D.1. Make targets

D.2. Procedure