Blog post: "My First OpenBSD Port"

[jggimi]

The OpenBSD Journal today had a short pointer to this link to Adam Wolk's experience as both a newbie to OpenBSD and as a new contributor to the Ports tree. He successfully ported the Otter browser to OpenBSD.

TL;DR - don't be afraid to become a contributor!

[TronDD]

To add on my experiences. I've helped get a couple of ports updated by testing newer releases and just submitting the diffs of distinfo and Makefile from ports. No coding needed. Even when I was wrong (library dependencies or configure switches also changed) it still sparked others pitch in to make it happen. Sometimes, you just need to start the ball rolling.

I also submitted patches to a port upstream and got them committed there so the ports maintainer didn't have to maintain patches anymore.

My only really direct contribution is 2 lame lines in a man page where all I had to to was copy/paste and change a couple things (I don't know the man page markup at all).

Testing patches, and testing ports are also easy to do.

The little things add up. Do what you can. You learn as you go.

Tim.

[acampbell]

Thanks for this encouragement!

I hadn't heard of otter-browser previously so I decided to try it, using -current snapshot of 2 Feb. Starting it gives an error message:

otter-browser:/usr/lib/libstdc++.so.57.0: /usr/local/lib/libestsE) size mismatch, relink your program

This is on AMD64. But otter-browser starts nevertheless and seems to run normally.

[jggimi]

The snapshots and the "snapshot packages" are built on different servers by different teams and are not ever exactly in sync with each other. Sometimes this means that a package will not install or not upgrade.

In this particular case, it is not an out-of-sync issue, it just looks like one. The warning is common with webkit applications. I understand that webkit uses stdc++ from gcc4 but one of its dependencies uses stdc++ from gcc3.

[acampbell]

Thanks for this clarification.