View Single Post
  #2   (View Single Post)  
Old 18th June 2008
jggimi's Avatar
jggimi jggimi is offline
More noise than signal
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: USA
Posts: 7,977
Default

1) You are not "porting", you are "building a port."

When used as a noun, "port" describes a 3rd party application. When used as a verb, "porting" is the act of creating a usable application from source code built to run on another OS. e.g.: "Samba has already been ported to OpenBSD. It was ported in 1997. The port became part of the tree in November of that year."

2) I will risk repeating what I told you already. USE PACKAGES.

e.g.:

# export PKG_PATH=ftp://rt.fm/pub/OpenBSD/4.3/packages/i386/
# pkg_add -iv samba

Read FAQ 15, again. Pay particular attention to FAQ 15.4.6:
Quote:
15.4.6 - What should I use: packages or ports?

In general, you are highly advised to use packages over building an application from ports. The OpenBSD ports team considers packages to be the goal of their porting work, not the ports themselves. Building a complex application from source is not trivial. Not only must the application be compiled, but the tools used to build it must be built as well. Unfortunately, OpenBSD, the tools, and the application are all evolving, and often, getting all the pieces working together is a challenge. Once everything works, a revision in any of the pieces the next day could render it broken. Every six months, as a new release of OpenBSD is made, an effort is made to test the building of every port on every platform, but during the development cycle it is likely that some ports will break.
In addition to having all the pieces work together, there is just the matter of time and resources required to compile some applications from source. A common example is CVSup, a tool commonly used to track the OpenBSD source tree. To install CVSup on a moderately fast system with a good Internet connection may take only about ten seconds -- the time required to download and unpack a single 779kB package file. In contrast, building CVSup on the same machine from source is a huge task, requiring many tools and bootstrapping a compiler, taking almost half an hour on the same machine. Other applications, such as Mozilla or KDE may take hours and huge amounts of disk space and RAM/swap to build. Why go through this much time and effort, when the programs are already compiled and sitting on your CD-ROM or FTP mirror, waiting to be used?
Of course, there are a few good reasons to use ports over packages in some cases:
  • Distribution rules prohibit OpenBSD from distributing a package.
  • You wish to modify or debug the application or study its source code.
  • You need a flavor of a port that is not built by the OpenBSD ports team.
  • You wish to alter the directory layout (i.e. modifying PREFIX or SYSCONFDIR).
However, for most people and most applications, using packages is a much easier, and definitely the recommended way of adding applications to an OpenBSD system.
Reply With Quote