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Old 12th March 2012
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sparky sparky is offline
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Default Using Ports are there any tools (newbie)

Hi,

I'm having a bit of difficulty in understanding the OpenBSD way of using "ports"......


Actually in all truth and honesty I'm lost




So apart from the standard package tools:

pkg_add, pkg_info etc.....

how do I fetch the Ports collection or Ports tree???


I'm running OpenBSD RELEASE 5.0 x64 under VirtualBox and using it as a learning platform.


What is confusing is that there are no tools such as portsnap or portmanager in order to handle the downloading and building and management of ports.


Currently what I've done in order to get packages is add this line to my .profile:

Code:
export PKG_PATH=ftp://ftp.mirrorservice.org/pub/OpenBSD/5.0/packages/`machine -a`/
now packages can be installed by using pkg_add <pkg> without any issue.... but if there is software that I would like to install eg. lcdproc (which is claimed to be able to install under OpenBSD) I got recommended to "create a port" rather then "hand compile".


Unfortunately I'm too new to OpenBSD to know what that means using this OS....

My previous experience I would put the source code into the /usr/ports/distfiles folder; but there isn't a /usr/ports/ directory on OpenBSD so I'm totally lost.


Could anyone help me making sense of this or perhaps help me understanding the different mentality here?


Many thanks.

Kaya
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