Way to have portsnap follow the same ports tree PKG uses?

[Dan Mahoney, System Admin]

Hey all,

There's some disconnect between the ports tree and pkg-ng -- there's no
good, easy way to say "I want to build this port with some custom options,
but I want all the dependencies installed via pkg. (You can get run-time
dependencies by installing it and removing it, then building your port --
but this still doesn't help build-time dependencies, which usually result
in a string of "crap, crap, ctrl-c, pkg-install [build dependency], rinse
repeat"

That said, since recent versions of FreeBSD started following the
quarterly build cycles, it means that if you build a port against whatever
portstap pulls in, it can potentially require newer versions of libraries
than what you sanely have installed.

My question is: is there a way to have portsnap pull down the same
"quarterly" that the pkg tree is being built against? And if so, can it
be made the default?

-Dan

--

[Brandon J. Wandersee]

Post by Dan Mahoney, System Admin
Hey all,
There's some disconnect between the ports tree and pkg-ng -- there's no
good, easy way to say "I want to build this port with some custom options,
but I want all the dependencies installed via pkg. (You can get run-time
dependencies by installing it and removing it, then building your port --
but this still doesn't help build-time dependencies, which usually result
in a string of "crap, crap, ctrl-c, pkg-install [build dependency], rinse
repeat"
That said, since recent versions of FreeBSD started following the
quarterly build cycles, it means that if you build a port against whatever
portstap pulls in, it can potentially require newer versions of libraries
than what you sanely have installed.
My question is: is there a way to have portsnap pull down the same
"quarterly" that the pkg tree is being built against? And if so, can it
be made the default?

portsnap can only fetch from the HEAD of the ports tree Subversion
repo. You need to use Subversion to actually fetch the quarterly
branch. The alternative is to change the package repository from
"quarterly" to "latest," as per the instructions found at the top of
/etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf. The former will give you all quarterly packages
and ports; the latter, all rolling-release packages and ports.

You may also be interested in ports-mgmt/synth, which is capable of
mixing packages and ports while avoiding conflicts. You can configure it
to fetch packages when possible (that is, when custom port options don't
conflict with default package options), including build dependencies.