diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/corp-net-guide/book.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/corp-net-guide/book.sgml index 5abc08a029..157c9bf200 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/corp-net-guide/book.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/corp-net-guide/book.sgml @@ -1,3222 +1,3222 @@ %books.ent; ]> The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Ted Mittelstaedt 2001 Addison-Wesley Longman, Inc (Original English language edition) 2001 Pearson Educational Japan (Japanese language translation) ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDITION ISBN: 0-201-70481-1 JAPANESE LANGUAGE EDITION ISBN: 4-89471-464-7 The eighth chapter of the book, The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide is excerpted here with the permission of the publisher. No part of it may be further reproduced or distributed without the publisher's express written Chanda.Leary-Coutu@awl.com. The other chapters of the book covers topics such as system administration, fileserving, and e-mail delivery. More information about this book is available from the publisher, with whom you can also sign up to receive news of related titles. The author's web site for the book includes sample code, working examples, errata and a Q&A forum, and is available at . Printserving Printserving is a complicated topic. There are many different software interfaces to printers, as well as a wide variety of printer hardware interfaces. This chapter covers the basics of setting up a print queue, using Samba to print, and administering print queues and connections. PC printing history In the early days of the personal computer, printing was simple. The PC owner bought a cheap printer, usually a dot matrix that barely supported ASCII, and plugged it into the computer with a parallel cable. Applications would either work with the printer or not, and most did because all they could do was output DOS or ASCII text. The few software applications that supported graphics generally could only output on specific makes and models of printers. Shared network printing, if it existed, was usually done by some type of serial port switchbox. This was the general state of affairs with the PC until the Windows operating system was released. All at once, application programmers were finally free of the restrictions of worrying about how some printer manufacturer would change printer control codes. Graphics printing, in the form of fonts and images, was added to most applications, and demand for it rapidly increased across the corporation. Large, high-capacity laser printers designed for office printing appeared on the scene. Printing went from 150 to 300 to 600 dpi for the common desktop laser printer. Today organizational network printing is complex, and printers themselves are more complicated. Most organizations find that sharing a few high-quality laser printers is much more cost effective than buying many cheaper dot matrix units. Good network print serving is a necessity, and it can be very well provided by the FreeBSD UNIX system. Printer communication protocols and hardware Printers that don't use proprietary vendor codes communicate with computers using one or more of three major printing protocols. The communication is done over a hardware cable that can be a parallel connection (printer port) or a serial connection (COM port). ASCII Printing Protocol The ASCII protocol is the simplest protocol used, as well as the oldest. ASCII is also used to represent text files internally in the DOS, UNIX, and Windows operating systems. Therefore, data taken from a text file or a directory listing generally requires little preparation before being sent to the printer, other than a newline-to-carriage return/linefeed conversion for UNIX. Printers usually follow the DOS text file convention of the print head requiring an explicit carriage return character followed by a linefeed character at the end of a line of text. Since UNIX uses only the linefeed character to terminate text, an additional carriage return character must be added to the end of each line in raw text print output; otherwise, text prints in a stairstep output. (Some printers have hardware or software switches to do the conversion.) PostScript Printing Protocol Adobe introduced the PostScript language in 1985; it is used to enable the printout of high quality graphics and styled font text. PostScript is now the de-facto print standard in the UNIX community, and the only print standard in the Macintosh community. Numerous UNIX utilities exist to beautify and enhance text printing with PostScript. PostScript can be used to download font files into a printer as well as the data to be printed. PostScript commands can be sent to instruct the printer CPU to image, rotate, and scale complex graphics and images, thus freeing the host CPU. Scaling is particularly important with fonts since the document with the font has been produced on a computer screen with far lower resolution than the printer. For example, a 1024x768 computer screen on a 17-inch monitor allows for a resolution of approximately 82dpi, a modern desktop printer prints at a resolution of 600dpi. Therefore, a font must be scaled at least seven times larger for WYSIWYG output! PostScript printers generally come with a number of resident fonts. For example, the NEC Silentwriter 95 contains Courier, Helvetica, ITC Avant Garde Gothic Book, ITC Bookman Light, New Century Schoolbook Roman, Palatino Roman, Times Roman, and several symbol fonts. These are stored in Read Only Memory (ROM) in the printer. When a page is printed from a Windows client that contains a font not in the printer, a font substitution table is used. If no substitute can be made, Courier is usually used. The user should be conscious of this when creating documents - documents with fonts not listed in the substitution table may cause other users problems when printing. Avoid use of strange fonts for documents that will be widely distributed. The user program can choose to download different fonts as outline fonts to the PostScript printer if desired. Fonts that are commonly used by the user are often downloaded to PostScript printers that are connected directly to the user's computer, the fonts are then available to successive print jobs until the printer is turned off. When PostScript printers are networked, the clients must download any fonts desired with each print job. Since jobs come from different clients, the clients cannot assume that downloaded fonts will still be in the printer. PostScript print jobs also contain a header that is sent describing the page layout, among other things. On a shared network printer, this header must also be downloaded with each print job. Although some PostScript drivers allow downloading of the header only once, this usually requires a bi-directional serial connection to the printer, instead of a unidirectional parallel connection. PostScript print jobs can be sent either as binary data or as ASCII. The main advantage of binary data transmission is that it is faster. However, not all PostScript printers support it. Also, fonts can generally not be downloaded in binary. When FreeBSD is used as a printserver, ASCII PostScript printing should be selected on the clients, this is generally the default with most PostScript drivers. The Adobe company licenses PostScript interpreters as well as resident fonts to printer manufacturers, and extracts a hefty license fee from any printer manufacturer who wants to use them in its printer. This presents both a benefit and a problem to the end user. Although a single company holding control over a standard can guarantee compliance, it does significantly raise the cost of the printer. As a result, PostScript has not met with much success in the lower-end laser and inkjet Windows printing market, despite the fact that Adobe distributes PostScript software operating system drivers for free. One issue that is a concern when networking PostScript printers is the selection of banner page, (also known as header page, or burst page) printing. UNIX shared printing began with ASCII line printers, and since UNIX is a multiuser system, often many different user print jobs piled up in the printer output hopper. To separate these jobs the UNIX printing system programs support banner page printing if the client program that submits jobs asks for them. These pages print at the beginning or end of every print job and contain the username, submittal date, and so on.. By default, most clients, whether remote (e.g., a Windows LPR client) or local (e.g., the /usr/bin/lpr program) trigger a banner page to be printed. One problem is that some PostScript printers abort the entire job if they get unformatted ASCII text instead of PostScript. (In general, PostScript printers compatible with Hewlett-Packard Printer Control Language [HPPCL] handle banners without problems) Banner printing should be disabled for any printers with this problem, unless PostScript banner page printing is set up on the server. HPPCL Printing Protocol The Hewlett Packard company currently holds the largest market share of desktop inkjet and office laser printers. Back when Windows was released, HP decided to expand into the desktop laser jet market with the first LaserJet series of printers. At the time there was much pressure on Microsoft to use Adobe Type Manager for scaleable fonts within Windows, and to print PostScript to higher-end printers. Microsoft decided against doing this and used a technically inferior font standard, Truetype. They thought that it would be unlikely that the user would download fonts to the printer, since desktop Publishing was not being done on PC's at the time. Instead users would rasterize the entire page to the printer using whatever proprietary graphics printer codes the selected printer needed. HP devised HPPCL for their LaserJets, and make PostScript an add-on. The current revision of HPPCL now allows for many of the same scaling and font download commands that PostScript does. HP laser jet printers that support PostScript can be distinguished by the letter "M" in their model number. (M is for Macintosh, since Macintosh requires PostScript to print) For example, the HP 6MP has PostScript, the 6P doesn't. HPPCL has almost no support in the UNIX applications market, and it is very unlikely that any will appear soon. One big reason is the development of the free Ghostscript PostScript interpreter. Ghostscript can take a PostScript input stream and print it on a PCL printer under UNIX. Another reason is the UNIX community's dislike of reinventing the wheel. HPPCL has no advantage over PostScript, and in many ways there are fewer problems with PostScript. Considering that PostScript can be added to a printer, either by hardware or use of Ghostscript, what is the point of exchanging an existing working solution for a slightly technically inferior one? Over the life of the printer, taking into account the costs of toner, paper, and maintenance, the initial higher cost of PostScript support is infinitesimal. Network Printing Basics The most common network printing implementation is a printserver accepting print jobs from clients tied to the server via a network cable. Printservers The term "printserver" is one of those networking terms, like packet, that has been carelessly tossed around until its meaning has become somewhat confusing and blurred. To be specific, a printserver is simply a program that arbitrates print data from multiple clients for a single printer. Printservers can be implemented in one of the four methods described in the following sections. Printserver on the fileserver The printer can be physically cabled to the PC running the Network OS. Print jobs are submitted by clients to the printserver software on the fileserver, which sends them down the parallel or serial cable to the printer. The printer must be physically close to the fileserver. This kind of printserving is popular in smaller workgroup networks, in smaller offices.
Printserver on the fileserver ,---------. | ======= | Server | ======= | +---------------------+ ,-----. +-----------+ | +---------------+ | | | | Printer [ ]------------[ ] | Printserver | | |_____| +-----------+ Parallel | | Software | [ ]------_________ Cable | +---------------+ | / ::::::: \ +---------------------+ `---------' Network PC Printer, connected to a network server running printserver software, with one or more network PCs printing through it.
Printserver on a separate PC It is possible to run a print server program on a cheap PC that is located next to the printer and plugged into it via parallel cable. This program simply acts as a pass-through program, taking network packets from the network interface and passing them to the printer. This kind of server doesn't allow any manipulation of print jobs, jobs usually come from a central fileserver, where jobs are controlled.
Printserver on a separate PC Fileserver ,----------------. ,---------. .---| | === | | ======= | ,-----. | `----------======' | ======= | | | | +-----------+ |_____| | | Printer [ ]------------_________---------| Ethernet +-----------+ Parallel / ::::::: \ | Cable `---------' | Printserver | ,-----. | | | | |_____| `---------_________ / ::::::: \ `---------' Network PC Printer connected to a printserver (typically running FreeBSD), with network files hosted on a separate machine, and a network PC, able to access both resources.
Printserver on a separate hardware box A printserver on a separate hardware box is exemplified by network devices such as the Intel Netport, the HP JetDirect Ex, the Osicom/DPI NETPrint, and the Lexmark MarkNet. Basically, these are plastic boxes with an Ethernet connection on one side and a parallel port on the other. Like a printserver on a PC, these devices don't allow remote job manipulation, and merely pass packets from the network down the parallel port to the printer.
Printserver on a separate hardware box Fileserver ,----------------. ,---------. .---| | === | | ======= | | `----------======' | ======= | Printserver | +-----------+ ,--------. | | Printer [ ]-----------[ ] ooo [ ]-------| Ethernet +-----------+ Parallel `--------' | Cable | | ,-----. | | | | |_____| `---------_________ / ::::::: \ `---------' Network PC Printer connected to a dedicated print server appliance.
Printserver in the Printer The HP JetDirect Internal is the best known printserver of this type. It is inserted into a slot in the printer case, and it works identically to the external JetDirect units.
Printserver in the printer Fileserver ,----------------. ,---------. .---| | === | | ======= | | `----------======' | ======= | | +-----------+ | | Printer [ ]------------------------------| Ethernet +-----------+ | | | ,-----. | | | | |_____| `---------_________ / ::::::: \ `---------' Network PC Printer with an embedded print server, connecting directly to the local network.
Printspools Printspooling is an integral part of network printing. Since the PC can spit out data much faster than the printer can accept it, the data must be buffered in a spool at some location. In addition, because many clients share printers, when clients send print jobs at the same time, jobs must be placed on a queue so that one can be printed after the other. Logical location of the print spool Printspooling can be implemented at one of three locations The client. Clients can be required to spool their own print jobs on their own disks. For example, when a Windows client application generates a print job the job must be placed on the local client's hard drive. Once the remote print server is free to accept the job it signals the client to start sending the job a bit at a time. Client spooling is popular in peer-to-peer networks with no defined central fileserver. However, it is impossible for a central administrator to perform advanced print job management tasks such as moving a particular print job ahead of another, or deleting jobs. The printserver. If each printer on the network is allocated their own combination print spooler-printserver, jobs can stack at the printer. Many of the larger printers with internal printservers have internal hard disks for this purpose. Although this enables basic job management, it still restricts the ability to move jobs from one printer to another. A central print spooler on a fileserver. Print jobs are received from all clients on the network in the spool and then dispatched to the appropriate printer. This scheme is the best for locations with several busy printers and many clients. Administration is extremely simple because all print jobs are spooled on a central server, which is particularly important in bigger organizations. Many large organizations have standardized on PostScript printing for all printing; in the event that a particular printer fails and is offline, incoming PostScript print jobs can be rerouted automatically to another printer. Since all printers and clients are using PostScript, clients don't need to be reconfigured when this happens. Print jobs appear the same whether printed on a 4 page-per-minute NEC Silentwriter 95, or a 24 page-per-minute HP LaserJet 5SiMX if both printers are defined in the client as PostScript printers.
Print spool locations Client ,---------. PC | ======= | ,-----. | ======= | | | +-----------+ |_____| | Printer [ ]---------------------------------------------------_________ +-----------+ / ::::::: \ `---------' Spool Printserver ,---------. PC | ======= | ,-----. | ======= | | | +-----------+ ,----------------. |_____| | Printer [ ]--------------| | === |-------------------_________ +-----------+ `----------======' / ::::::: \ Spool `---------' Fileserver ,---------. PC | ======= | ,-----. | ======= | Printserver Fileserver | | +-----------+ ,----------------. ,----------------. |_____| | Printer [ ]----| | === |-----| | === |------_________ +-----------+ `----------======' `----------======' / ::::::: \ Spool `---------' Possible locations for the print spool
FreeBSD is an excellent platform to implement centralized printserving and print spooling. The rest of this chapter concentrates on the centralized print spooler model. Note that PostScript printing is not a requirement for this model--the HPPCL protocol can be the standard print protocol as well. For transparent printing between printers with HPPCL, however, the printer models must be similar. Physical location of the print spool In some companies, the central fileserver is often placed in a closet, locked away. Printers, on the other hand, are best located in high traffic areas for ease of use. Network printing works best when the printers are evenly distributed throughout the organization. Attempting to place all the major printers in one location, as technically advantageous as it may seem, merely provokes users to requisition smaller printers that are more convenient for that quick print job. The administrator may end up with a datacenter full of nice, expensive printers that are never used, while the smaller personal laser printers scattered throughout the plant bear most of the printing load. The big problem with this is that scattering printers through the organization makes it difficult to utilize the 3 possible parallel ports on the fileserver due to parallel port distance limitations. Although high-speed serial ports may extend the distance, not many printers have good serial ports on them. This is where the hardware network print server devices can come into play. I prefer using these devices because they are much cheaper and more reliable than a standalone PC running printserver software. For example, Castelle sells the LANpress 1P/10BT printserver for about $170.00. Using these devices a FreeBSD UNIX server can have dozens of print spools accepting print jobs and then route them back out over the network to these remote printserver boxes. If these hardware servers are used, they must support the Line Printer Daemon (LPD) print protocol. With a scheme like this it is important to have enough disk space on the spool to handle the print jobs. A single large PowerPoint presentation PostScript print job containing many graphics may be over 100MB. When many such jobs stack up in the print spool waiting to print, the print spooler should have several gigabytes of free disk space available. Network Printing to Remote Spools Although several proprietary network printing protocols such as Banyan Vines and NetWare, are tied to proprietary network protocols, FreeBSD UNIX can use two TCP/IP network printing protocols to print to remote print spools. The two print protocols available on TCP/IP with FreeBSD are the open LPD protocol and the NetBIOS-over-TCP/IP Server Messaging Block (SMB) print protocol first defined by Intel and Microsoft and later used by IBM and Microsoft. The LPD protocol is defined in RFC1179. This network protocol is the standard print protocol used on all UNIX systems. LPD client implementations exist for all Windows operating systems and DOS. Microsoft has written LPD for the Windows NT versions, the other Windows operating system implementations are provided by third parties. The Microsoft Networking network protocol that runs on top of SMB can use NetBIOS over TCP/IP as defined in RFC1001 and RFC1002. This protocol has a specification for printing that is the same print protocol used to send print jobs to NT Server by Microsoft clients. To implement this protocol on FreeBSD requires the installation of the Samba client suite of programs discussed in Chapter 7. Setting up LPR on Windows clients The program clients use to print via LPD is the Line Printer Remote, or LPR program. The following instructions cover enabling this program on Windows clients. Windows 3.1/Windows for Workgroups 3.11 Several commercial TCP/IP stacks are available for Win31, that provide LPR client programs, in addition to the basic TCP/IP protocol to Win31. WfW has TCP/IP networking available for free from Microsoft, but it doesn't include an LPR client. Unfortunately, I have not come across a freeware implementation of a 16-bit Windows LPR client, so with the following instructions I use the Shareware program WLPRSPL available from . This program must be active during client printing, and is usually placed in the Startup group. Organizations that want to use UNIX as a printserver to a group of Win31 clients without using a commercial or shareware LPR program have another option. The Microsoft Networking client for DOS used underneath Win31 contains SMB-based printing which is covered later in the chapter. DOS networking client setup and use are covered in Chapter 2 and Chapter 7. If LPR-based client printing is desired and the organization doesn't want to upgrade to Win95, (which has several LPR clients available) the following instructions can be used. WLPRSPL needs a Winsock under Windows 3.1, so for the example I explain the setup of the Novell 16-bit TCP/IP client. The stack can be FTPed from Novell, and is easy to integrate into sites that already use the 16-bit NetWare networking client, usually NW 3.11 and 3.12. In most cases, however, sites that use NetWare + Win31 are probably best off printing through the NetWare server, then loading an LPR spooler as an Netware Loadable Module (NLM) to send the job over to FreeBSD. As an alternate, the Microsoft Networking DOS 16-bit TCP/IP client under Win31 contains a Winsock, as does Microsoft TCP/IP for WfW. The target machine used here is a Compaq Deskpro 386/33 with 12MB of ram with an operating version of Windows 3.1, and a 3com 3C579 EISA network card. The instructions assume an LPR printserver on the network, named mainprinter.my.domain.com with a print queue named RAW. Use the installation instructions in Exhibit 8.1 for a quick and dirty TCP/IP Winsock for Win31 systems. Administrators who already have the Novell IPX client installed should skip those steps. Installation of the Novell TCP/IP Winsock client Make sure that the machine has enough environment space (2048 bytes or more) by adding the following line to the config.sys file and rebooting: SHELL=C:\COMMAND.COM /E:2048 /P Obtain the TCP16.EXE file from . Obtain the Network Adapter support diskette for the network card in your machine. This should be supplied with the card, or available via FTP from the network adapter manufacturer's FTP site. Now you need the file LSL.COM. This is available on some Network Adapter Driver diskettes, it used to be available from the VLM121_2.EXE file from Novell but unfortunately this file is no longer publicly accessible from Novell. If you have vlm121_2.exe in a temporary directory, run it. This will extract a number of files. One of the files extracted is LSL.CO_ extract this file with the command nwunpack lsl.co_. Create the directory c:\nwclient. Then, copy lsl.com from the temporary directory into the directory. Obtain and install the printer driver for the model of printer that you will be spooling to and point it to LPT1:. Win31 and WfW 3.11 have an incomplete printer driver list, so if you need a driver Microsoft has many Win16 printer drivers on their FTP site. A list is available at . In addition, if you are installing a PostScript printer driver for a printer supplied in Win31, it may be necessary to patch the driver. The Microsoft PostScript driver supplied in Win31 is version 3.5. (The patch named PSCRIP.EXE which brought the PostScript driver to version 3.58 is no longer publicly available.) WfW already uses the more recent PostScript driver, as does Win31 version A. Installing the Adobe PostScript driver for Win31 is also an option. (see for the version 3.1.2 Win31 PostScript driver). Look on the network adapter driver disk for the subdirectory nwclient/ and then look for the ODI driver for the adapter card. For example, on the 3com 3C509/3C579 adapter driver disk, the driver and location are \NWCLIENT\3C5X9.COM. Copy this driver to the c:\nwclient directory. Create a file called NET.CFG in the c:\nwclient directory. Often, the network card adapter driver diskette has a template for this file in the same location as the ODI driver. This can be modified, as can the following example: LINK SUPPORT BUFFERS 4 1600 MEMPOOL 8192 LINK DRIVER 3C5X9 ; PORT 300 (these are optional, if needed by card uncomment) ; INT 10 (optional, uncomment and modify if needed) Attempt to load the network card driver. First load lsl, then the ODI driver. With the 3com card the commands are: lsl 3c5x9 If the driver properly loads it will list the hardware port and interrupt settings for the network adapter. If it has loaded properly, unload the drivers in reverse order with the command: 3c5x9 /u lsl /u Go to the temporary directory that contains the tcp16.exe file and extract it by running the program. Run the install batch file by typing installr. It should list New Installation detected. It will then copy a number of files into nwclient, add some commented-out sections to net.cfg, and call edit on net.cfg. Read the editing instructions and make the appropriate entries. The sample net.cfg file from above would look like this. LINK SUPPORT BUFFERS 4 1600 MEMPOOL 8192 LINK DRIVER 3C5X9 FRAME ETHERNET_II Protocol TCPIP PATH TCP_CFG c:\nwclient ip_address 192.168.1.54 LAN_NET ip_netmask 255.255.255.0 LAN_NET ip_router 192.168.1.1 LAN_NET Bind 3C5X9 #1 Ethernet_II LAN_NET Save and exit, the Installer should list TCP16 installation completed. Reload the client with the commands: lsl 3c5x9 tcpip The TCP/IP driver should list the IP numbers and other information. Optionally, create either a HOSTS file, or a RESOLV.CFG file (pointing to a nameserver) in c:\nwclient. Check to see this is operating properly by pinging a hostname. Add the c:\nwclient directory to the PATH, as well as the 3 startup commands in step 15 in autoexec.bat Installation of the LPR client on 16-bit Windows with a Winsock installed The following assumes a running Win31 installation with a Winsock or a running WfW installation with the 32-bit Microsoft TCP/IP protocol installed. Install the printer driver desired. See step 8 of the previous set of instructions. Obtain and extract into a temporary directory the wlprs41.zip file from the location mentioned above. Run setup.exe from the temporary directory containing the wlprs files. In setup, accept default directory, and check Yes to add to its own group. Click Continue when asked for group name, and check whatever choice you want when asked to copy the doc files. Click No when asked to add the program to Startup. On the UNIX FreeBSD print spooler, make sure that there is an entry in /etc/hosts.lpd or /etc/hosts.equiv for the client workstation, thereby allowing it to submit jobs. Double-click the Windows LPR Spooler icon in the Windows LPR Spooler group that is opened. When it asks for a valid spool directory, just select the c:\wlprspl directory that the program installed its files into. When asked for a valid Queue Definition File, just click OK to use the default filename. The program automatically creates a queue definition file. The program opens up with its menu. Click Setup in the top menu, then select Define New Queue. For a local spool filename, just use the name of the remote queue (RAW) to which the client prints. For the remote printer name, use the same name as the remote queue (RAW) to which the client prints. For the remote hostname, use the machine name of the FreeBSD print spooler. mainprinter.ayedomain.com. For the Description, enter a description such as 3rd floor Marketing printer. For the protocol, leave the default of BSD LPR/LPD selected. Click on the Queue Properties, and make sure that the Print unfiltered is selected. If you're printing PostScript, then also click the Advanced options button. Make sure that Remove trailing Ctrl-D is unchecked, and that Remove Leading Ctrl-D is checked. Also with PostScript, if the printer cannot print ASCII, uncheck the Send header page box. (PostScript header/banner pages are discussed later in this chapter) Click OK. At the main menu of the program, click File, then Control Panel/Printers to bring up the Printers control panel of Windows. Make sure that the Use Print Manager button is checked, then highlight the printer driver and click the Connect button. Scroll down to the C:\WLPRSPL\RAW entry for the spool that was built and highlight this. Click OK. Minimize the Windows LPR Spooler. Copy the Windows LPR Spooler icon to the Startup group. Click File/Properties with the Windows LPR Spooler icon highlighted in the Startup group. Check the Run Minimized button. Exit Windows, and when the Save queue changes? button comes up, click Yes. Restart windows and make sure that the spooler starts up. Open the Control Panel and look for a new yellow icon named Set Username If you are running the Novell or other Winsock under Win31, click on this icon and put the username of the person using this computer into the space provided. If you are running WfW, this isn't necessary because Windows will supply the username. If the spooler is not started properly in some installations, there may be a bug. If placing the icon in the Startup group doesn't actually start the spooler, the program name can be placed in the run= line of win.ini. Try printing a print job from an application such as Notepad. If everything goes properly, clicking on the Queues/Show remote printer status" in the Windows LPR menu should show the print job spooled and printing on the remote printserver. Installation of LPR client on Windows 95/98 The wlprspl program also can be used under Windows 95, but as a 16-bit program, it is far from an optimal implementation on a 32-bit operating system. In addition, Win95 and its derivatives fundamentally changed from Windows 3.1 in the printing subsystem. For these reasons I use a different LPR client program for Win95/98 LPR printing instructions. It is a full 32-bit print program, and it installs as a Windows 32-bit printer port monitor. The program is called ACITS LPR Remote Printing for Windows 95 and it is located at . ACITS stands for Academic Computing and Instructional Technologies Services. The ACITS LPR client includes software developed by the University of Texas at Austin and its contributors, it was written by Glenn K. Smith, a systems analyst with the Networking Services group at the university. The filename of the archive in the original program was ACITSLPR95.EXE and as of version 1.4 it was free for individuals or organizations to use for their internal printing needs. Since that time, it has gotten so popular that the university has taken over the program, incremented the version number (to get out from under the free license) and is now charging a $35 per copy fee for commercial use for the newer versions. The older free version can still be found on overseas FTP servers, such as . It is likely that the cost of a shareware/commercial LPR program for Win95 plus the cost of Win95 itself will meet or exceed that of Win2K. As such, users wishing to print via LPR to FreeBSD UNIX systems will probably find it cheaper to simply upgrade to Windows NT Workstation or Win2K. - ACITS LPR and Win95 have a few printing idosyncracies. Most + ACITS LPR and Win95 have a few printing idiosyncrasies. Most Win95 programs, such as Microsoft Word, expect print output to be spooled on the local hard drive and then metered out to a printer that is plugged into the parallel port. Network printing, on the other hand, assumes that print output will go directly from the application to the remote print server. Under Win95, local ports have a setting under Properties, Details, Spool Settings labeled "Print directly to the printer". If this is checked, the application running on the desktop (such as Microsoft Word) will not create a little Printer icon with pages coming out of it or use other means of showing the progress of the job as it is built. This can be very disconcerting to the user of a network printer, so this option should be checked only with printers plugged directly into the parallel port. Worse, if this is checked with ACITS, it can cause the job to abort if the remote print spooler momentarily goes offline. Another local setting also should be changed. Generally, with local ports, Win95 builds the first page in the spooler and then starts printing it while the rest of the pages spool. If ACITS starts printing the first page while the rest of the pages are building, timeouts at the network layer can sometimes cause very large jobs to abort. The entire job should be set to completely spool before the LPR client passes it to the UNIX spooler. The problem is partly the result of program design: because ACITS is implemented as a local printer port instead of being embedded into Win95 networking (and available in Network Neighborhood) the program acts like a local printer port in some ways. The LPR program can be set to deselect banner/burst page printing if a PostScript printer that cannot support ASCII is used. The burst pages referred to here are NOT generated by the Windows machine. Use the instructions in Exhibit 8.3 to install ACITS. LPR client on Win95/98 installation instructions Obtain the ACITSLPR95.EXE file and place it in a temporary directory such as c:\temp1. Close all running programs on the desktop. The computer must be rebooted at completion of installation or the program will not work. Click Start, Run and type in c:\temp1\acitslpr95 then click Yes at the InstallShield prompt. Click Next, then Yes. The program will run through some installation and then presents a Help screen that explains how to configure an LPR port. After the help screen closes, the program asks to reboot the system. Ensure that Yes is checked and click Finish to reboot. After the machine comes back up, install a Printer icon in the Start, Settings, Printers folder if one hasn't been created for the correct model of destination printer. With the Printers folder open, right-click over the printer icon that needs to use the LPR program and click on the Properties tab. Under the Details tab, click the Add Port tab, then click Other. Highlight the ACITS LPR Remote Printing line and click OK. The Add ACITS LPR screen opens. Type in the hostname of the UNIX system that the client spools through— mainprinter.ayedomain.com. Type in the Printer/Queue name and click OK. (Some versions have a "Verify Printer Information" button.) The LPR program then contacts the UNIX host and makes sure that the selected printer is available. If this fails the client machine name is probably not in the /etc/hosts.equiv or etc/hosts.lpd on the FreeBSD printserver. Most sites may simply decide to put a wildcard in hosts.equiv to allow printing, especially if DHCP is used, but many security-conscious sites may stick with individual entries in hosts.lpd. If the printer is PostScript and cannot print ASCII, make sure that the "No banner page control flag" is checked to turn off banner pages. Accessible under Port settings, this flag is overridden if the /etc/printcap file specifies no banner pages. Review how the "send plain text control flag" is set. With this flag unchecked, the LPR code sent is L, (i.e., print unfiltered) meaning that the if filter gets called with the option. This is equivalent to the local invocation of /usr/bin/lpr -l. With the flag checked, the code is F, (formatted) meaning that the if filter gets called without the option. This is equivalent to the default invocation /usr/bin/lpr. (This is also an issue under Windows NT, which retypes the print job to text if this flag is checked. Some filters understand the flag, which is used to preserve control characters, so it should generally remain unchecked. Leave the "Send data file before control file" box unchecked. This option is used only in rare mainframe spooling circumstances. Click OK, then click the Spool Settings button at the properties page. Make sure that the "Spool print jobs so program finishes printing faster" box is checked. Make sure that "Start printing after last page is spooled" box is checked. Make sure that "Disable bi-directional support for this printer" is checked, or greyed out. Make sure that the "Spool data format" is set to RAW. Some printer drivers present a choice of EMF or RAW, such as the Generic Text driver, in this case select RAW. Click OK, then OK again to close the Printer Properties. The printer icon now spools through FreeBSD. Installation of LPR client on Windows NT Unlike WfW and Win95 TCP/IP, Windows NT—both server and workstation—includes an LPR client as well as an LPD program that allows incoming print jobs to be printed from LPR clients, such as UNIX systems. To install the LPR client and daemon program under Windows NT 3.51, use the following instructions. The TCP/IP protocol should be installed beforehand and you must be logged in to the NT system as Administrator. This can be done at any time after the NT system is installed, or during OS installation: Double-click on Main, Control Panel, then Network Settings. In the Installed Network Software window, "Microsoft TCP/IP Printing" should be listed as well as "TCP/IP Protocol". If it is, stop here; otherwise continue. Click the Add Software button to get the Add Network Software dialog box Click the down arrow and select TCP/IP Protocol and related components. Click Continue. Check the "TCP/IP Network Printing Support" box and click Continue. LPR printing is now installed. Follow the instructions to reboot to save changes. To install the LPR client and daemon program under Windows NT 4, use the following instructions. The TCP/IP protocol should be installed beforehand and you must be logged in to the NT system as Administrator. This can be done at any time after the NT system is installed, or during OS installation: Click on Start, Settings, Control Panel, and double-click on Network to open it up. Click on the Services tab. Microsoft TCP/IP Printing should be listed. If not, continue steps 3 - 4. Click Add, then select Microsoft TCP/IP Printing and click OK. Click Close. Follow instructions to reboot to save changes. Any NT Service Packs that were previously installed must be reapplied after these operations. Once LPR printing has been installed, the Printer icon or icons must be created on the NT system so that applications can print. Since this printer driver does all job formatting before passing the printing to the FreeBSD printserver, the print queues specified should be raw queues on the FreeBSD system, which don't do any job formatting. To install the printer icon in Print Manager and set it to send print jobs to the FreeBSD UNIX system, use the following instructions under NT 3.51. You must be logged in to the NT system as Administrator. This can be done at any time after the NT system is installed, or during OS installation. Click on Main, and open it. Then click on Print Manager to open it. Click on Printer, Create Printer. Select the appropriate printer driver. Click the down arrow under Print To and select Other. In the Available Print Monitors window select LPR port and click OK. Enter the hostname of the FreeBSD printserver, and the name of the printer queue and click OK Click OK to close the Create Printer window. The Printer icon is created. To install the printer icon in Print Manager and set it to send print jobs to the FreeBSD UNIX system, use the following instructions under NT 4. You must be logged in to the NT system as Administrator. This can be done at any time after the NT system is installed, or during OS installation: Click Start, Settings, Printers to open the printer folder. Double-click Add Printer to start the wizard. Select the My Computer radio button, not the Network Print Server button and click Next. (The printer is a networked printer, it is managed on the local NT system. Microsoft used confusing terminology here. Click Add Port and select LPR Port, then click New Port. Enter the hostname and print queue for the FreeBSD printserver and click OK. Click Next and select the correct printer driver. Continue until the printer is set up. The LPR client in Windows NT allows DOS print jobs originating in DOS boxes to be routed to the central UNIX print spooler. This is an advantage over the Win95 and WfW LPR programs. Windows NT Registry Changes Using the LPR daemon program under Windows NT presents one problem. If the NT server is used as an LPR/LPD "relay", for example, to pass jobs from clients to LPR print queues on a UNIX system, to pass jobs from LPR programs on UNIX terminating at NT print queues, or to pass jobs from Appletalk clients to LPR printers, NT retypes the job if the type code is set to P (text). This can wreak havoc on PostScript files printed through HP LaserJet printers with internal MIO cards in them, if the job originates from the /usr/bin/lpr program under UNIX, which assigns a P type code. The printserver card treats PostScript jobs as text, and instead of the print job, the raw PostScript codes print. This problem often manifests in the following way: /usr/bin/lpr is used to print a PostScript file from UNIX directly to the remote printer printserver, which works fine, but spooling it through NT causes problems. A registry change that can override the NT Server formatting behavior is detailed in Microsoft Knowledge Base article ID Q150930. With Windows NT 3.51, and 4.0 up to service pack 1 the change is global. Starting with NT 4.0 Service pack 2 the change can be applied to specific print queues, (see Knowledge Base article ID Q168457). This registry change also works for Windows 2000. Under Windows NT 4.0, the change is: Run Registry Editor (REGEDT32.EXE) From the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE subtree, go to the following key: \SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LPDSVC\Parameters On the Edit menu, click Add Value. Add the following: Value Name: SimulatePassThrough Data Type: REG_DWORD Data 1 The default value is 0, which informs LPD to assign datatypes according to the control commands. Under Windows NT 3.51, the change is: Run Registry Editor (REGEDT32.EXE) From the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE subtree, go to the following key: \SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LPDSVC\Parameters On the Edit menu, click Add Value. Add the following: Value Name: SimulatePassThrough Data Type: REG_DWORD Data 1 The default value is 0, which informs LPD to assign datatypes according to the control commands. Create an LPD key at the same level as the LPDSVC key. Click the LPDSVC Key, click Save Key from the Registry menu, and then save the file as LPDSVC.KEY Click the LPD key created in step 5. Click Restore on the Registry menu, click the file created in step 6, and then click OK. A warning message appears. Click OK and then quit the Registry Editor. At a command prompt window, type: net stop lpdsvc net start lpdsvc Printing PostScript and DOS command files One problem with printing under Win31 and Win95 with the LPR methods discussed is the lack of a raw LPT1: device. This is annoying to the administrator who wants to print an occasional text file, such as a file full of printer control codes, without their being intercepted by the Windows printer driver. Of course this is also an issue with DOS programs, but a commercial site that runs significant DOS software and wants to print directly to UNIX with LPR really only has one option—to use a commercial TCP/IP stack containing a DOS LPR program. Normally, under Windows printing, virtually all graphical programs print through the Windows printer driver. This is true even of basic programs such as Notepad. For example, an administrator may have a DOS batch file named filename.txt containing the following line: echo \033&k2G > lpt1: This batch file switches a HP LaserJet from CR-LF, MS-DOS textfile printing into Newline termination UNIX textfile printing. Otherwise, raw text printed from UNIX on the HP prints with a stairstep effect. If the administrator opens this file with Notepad and prints it using a regular printer driver, such as an Epson LQ, the Windows printer driver encapsulates this print output into a series of printer-specific control codes that do things such as initialize the printer, install fonts, and so on. The printer won't interpret this output as control code input. Usually, if the printer is locally attached, the user can force a "raw text print" of the file by opening a DOS window and running: copy filename.txt lpt1: /b Since the LPR client program doesn't provide a DOS driver, it cannot reroute input from the LPT1: device ports. The solution is to use the Generic / Text Only printer driver in conjunction with Wordpad (under Win95); under Win31 use a different text editor. The Notepad editor supplied with Windows is unsuitable for this - it "helpfully" inserts a 1 inch margin of spaces around all printed output, as well as the filename title. Wordpad supplied with Win95, can be set to use margins of zero, and inserts no additions into the printed output. Also, make sure that banner pages are turned off, and the print type is set to raw. Checking PostScript Printer capabilities Following is a PostScript command file that can be used to get a PostScript printer to output a number of useful pieces of information that are needed to set up a printer icon under Windows properly. It was printed from Wordpad, in Win95, through the Generic / Text Only printer driver with the following instructions: Start, Run, type in Wordpad and press Enter. File, Open testps.txt File, Page Setup, Printer, select Generic / Text Only, click Properties Click Device Options, select TTY custom, click OK. Click OK, then set all four margins to 0; click OK. Click File, Print, OK. This could also have been printed with /usr/bin/lpr on a UNIX command prompt. The file prints Test Page and some printer statistics below that, as follows. % filename: testps.txt % purpose: to verify proper host connection and function of PostScript % printers. /buf 10 string def /CM { save statusdict/product get (PostScript) anchorsearch exch pop {length 0 eq {1}{2}ifelse } {2}ifelse exch restore }bind def /isCM { CM 1 ge }bind def /Times-BoldItalic findfont 75 scalefont setfont 150 500 moveto (Test Page) false charpath isCM{gsave 0.0 1.0 1.0 0.0 setcmykcolor fill grestore}if 2 setlinewidth stroke /Times-Roman findfont 10 scalefont setfont 150 400 moveto (Your PostScript printer is properly connected and operational.)show 150 380 moveto (The border around the page indicates your printer's printable region.)show { vmreclaim } stopped pop vmstatus exch sub exch pop 150 360 moveto (Max Available Printer Virtual Memory (KB):)show 150 340 moveto dup 1024 div truncate buf cvs show 150 320 moveto (Calculated memory size used for PostScript printer icon properties:) show 150 300 moveto 0.85 mul 1024 div truncate buf cvs show 150 280 moveto (Printer Model: )show statusdict begin product show end 150 260 moveto (PostScript Level: )show /languagelevel where { languagelevel 3 string cvs show pop } {(1) show } ifelse 150 240 moveto (PostScript Version: )show statusdict begin version show (.)show revision 40 string cvs show end clippath stroke showpage Setting up LPR/LPD on FreeBSD When a FreeBSD system is booted, it starts the LPD spooler control daemon program if the /etc/rc.conf file has lpd_enable="YES" set. If this is not set, attempts to print through and from the FreeBSD system will fail with an lpr: connect: No such file or directory error message. The LPD program manages all incoming print jobs, whether they come in from the network, or from local users on the UNIX system. It transfers print jobs to all locally attached parallel or serial printers, as well as defined remote printers. Several programs also are used to manipulate jobs in the print spools that LPD manages, as well as the user programs to submit them from the UNIX command prompt. All of these programs use the /etc/printcap file, which is the master control file for the printing system. Back when printing was mostly text, it was common to place printers on a serial connection that stretched for long distances. Often, 9600bps was used because it could work reliably up to a block away, which allowed printers to be located almost anywhere on an office high-rise floor. Modern office print jobs, on the other hand, are generally graphics-laden and tend to be rather large. These jobs would take hours to transfer over a slower 9600bps serial printer connection. Today, most printers that are not connected to a remote hardware print server box are directly connected to the server using parallel cables. All of the examples shown here are direct connections that are parallel connections. The printcap configuration file, like most UNIX configuration files, indicates comment lines starting with a hash character. Lines without a hash character are meant to be part of a printer queue description line. Each printer queue description line starts with a symbolic name, and ends with a newline. Since the description lines are often quite long, they are often written to span multiple lines by escaping intermediate newlines with the backslash (\) character. The /etc/printcap file, as supplied, defines a single printer queue, lp. The lp queue is the default queue. Most UNIX-supplied printing utilities send print output to this queue if no printer is specified by the user. It should be set to point to the most popular print queue with local UNIX print users, (i.e., users that have shell accounts). The layout of /etc/printcap is covered in the manual page, which is reached by running the man printcap command. The stock /etc/printcap file at the line defining the spool lp shows: # lp|local line printer:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0:sd=/var/spool/output/lpd:lf=/var/log/lpd-errs: # In this example the first line defines the names by which the printer is known, and ends with an escaped newline. The next line defines the physical device, the PC parallel port, by /dev/lpt0, and the directory in which the spool files are stored at /var/spool/output/lpd, and the error log file. Note that this particular error log file will not show all LPD errors, such as bad job submittals, it usually shows only the errors that originate within the printing system itself. In general, the administrator creates two print queues for every printer that is connected to the FreeBSD machine. The first queue entry contains whatever additional capabilities UNIX shell users on the server require. The second is a raw queue that performs no print processing on the incoming print job. This queue is used by remote clients, such as Windows clients, that format their own jobs. If the administrator is setting up the printer to allow incoming LPR jobs from network clients, such as other Windows or UNIX systems, those systems must be listed in /etc/hosts.lpd. Creating the spools Building new print spools is merely a matter of making an entry in the /etc/printcap file, creating the spool directories, and setting the correct permissions on them. For example, the following additional line defines a PostScript printer named NEC (in addition to the lp definition): # lp|local line printer:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0:sd=/var/spool/output/lpd:lf=/var/log/lpd-errs: NEC|NEC Silentwriter 95 PostScript printer:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0:sd=/var/spool/output/NEC:lf=/var/log/lpd-errs: # Because UNIX is case sensitive, NEC is different from nec in both the name of the printer and the name of the Spool directory. With the print spooler LPD, the Spool directories must be different from each other, - or the spooler gets confused and doesen't print. + or the spooler gets confused and doesn't print. After the /etc/printcap is modified, the root user must create the /var/spool/output/NEC directory and assign ownership of it to the bin user, assign group ownership to daemon, and set permissions with the following commands: &prompt.user; su root &prompt.root; cd /var/spool/output &prompt.root; mkdir NEC &prompt.root; chown bin NEC &prompt.root; chgrp daemon NEC &prompt.root; chmod 755 NEC Additional spool capabilities Because modern print jobs (especially PostScript) can sometimes reach hundreds of megabytes, the sd capability entry in the /etc/printcap file should always point to a Spool directory on a filesystem that has enough space. The /var directory on a default FreeBSD installation is generally set to a fairly small amount, which can easily overflow the spool. There are four ways to handle this problem: During FreeBSD installation, if the administrator knows a lot of print jobs are going to go through the spooler, /var should be set to a large amount of free space. Modify the sd capability in the /etc/printcap file to point to a spool directory in a different, larger filesystem, such as /usr/spool. Use soft links to point the /var/spool/output directory to directories on a larger filesystem. Don't define a /var directory at all during FreeBSD installation; this would make the installer link /var to /usr/var. In addition to spools, the following other capabilities are usually placed in a production /etc/printcap file. The entry fo prints a form feed when the printer is opened. It is handy for HPPCL (HP LaserJets) or other non-PostScript printers that are located behind electronic print sharing devices. It can also be used for printers that accept input from multiple connections, such as a parallel port, serial port, and localtalk port. An example is an HP LaserJet with an MIO card in it plugged into both Ethernet and LocalTalk networks. It will clear any garbage out of the printer before the job is processed. The entry mx defines the maximum size of a print job, which is a must for modern print jobs that frequently grow far past the default print size of a megabyte. The original intent of this capability was to prevent errant programs from stuffing the spool with jobs so large that they would use up all paper in a printer. Graphics-heavy print jobs have made it impossible to depend on this kind of space limitation, so mx is usually set to zero, which turns it off. The entry sh suppresses printing of banner pages in case the printer cannot handle ASCII and the client mistakenly requests them. The entry ct denotes a TCP Connection timeout. This is useful if the remote print server doesn't close the connection properly. FreeBSD 2.2.5 contains a bug in the LPD system - as a workaround the ct capability needs to be set very large, such as 3600, or the appropriate patch installed and LPD recompiled. More recent versions of FreeBSD do not have this bug. Printing to hardware print server boxes or remote print servers. Hardware print server boxes, such as the HP JetDirect internal and external cards, need some additional capabilities defined in the /etc/printcap entry; rp, for remote print spool, and rm for remote machine name. The rm capability is simply the DNS or /etc/hosts name of the IP number associated with the remote printserver device. Obviously, print server devices, such as the HP JetDirect, must not use a dynamic TCP/IP network numbering assignment. If they get their numbering via DHCP, the IP number should be assigned from the static pool; it should always be the same IP number. Determining the name used for rp, on the other hand, can be rather difficult. Here are some common names: Windows NT Server: Printer name of the printer icon created in Print Manager FreeBSD: Print queue name defined in /etc/printcap HP JetDirect: Either the name TEXT or the name RAW. TEXT automatically converts incoming UNIX newline text to DOS-like CR/LF text that the printer can print. RAW should be used for PostScript, and HPPCL printing. HP JetDirect EX +3: External, 3 port version of the JetDirect. Use RAW1, RAW2, RAW3, TEXT1, TEXT2, or TEXT3 depending on the port desired. Intel NetPort: Either use TEXT for UNIX text conversion printing or use PASSTHRU for normal printing. DPI: Use PORT1 or PORT2 depending on which port the printer is plugged into. For other manufacturer's print servers refer to the manuals supplied with those devices. The following is an example printcap that redefines the default lp print queue to send print jobs to the first parallel port on a remote HP LaserJet plugged into a JetDirect EX +3 named floor2hp4.biggy.com. # lp|local line printer:\ :rm=floor2hp4.biggy.com:rp=RAW1:\ :sd=/var/spool/output/lpd:\ :lf=/var/log/lpd-errs: # The rp capability must be defined or the job goes to the default print queue on the remote host. If the remote device does not have a single print queue, such as another UNIX system, this causes problems. For example, if the remote device was a JetDirect EX + 3 and rp was omitted, all queues defined would print out of the first parallel port. Filters The last two important printcap capabilities concern print filters, if (input filter) and of (output filter). If defined, incoming print jobs are run through the filters that these entries point to for further processing. Filters are the reason that the UNIX print spooling system is so much more powerful than any other commercial server operating system. Under FreeBSD, incoming print jobs are acted on by any filters specified in the /etc/printcap no matter where they originate. Incoming print jobs from remote Windows, Mac, NT, OS/2 or other clients can be intercepted and manipulated by any program specified as a filter. Want a PostScript Printer? There's a filter that adds PostScript capability to a non-PostScript printer. Want to make a cheap Epson MX 80 dot-matrix emulate an expensive Okidata Microline dot-matrix for some archaic mainframe application? Write a filter that will rewrite the print codes to do it. Want custom-built banner pages? Use a filter. Many UNIX /etc/printcap filters on many Internet sites can do a variety of interesting and unique things. Someone may have already written a filter that does what you want! Types of Filters Three types of filters can be defined in the /etc/printcap file. In this book all filter examples are for Input filters. Input Filters Input filters are specified by the if capability. Every job that comes into the spool is acted on by any filter specified in the if entry for that spool. Virtually all filters that an administrator would use are specified here. These filters can be either shell scripts, or compiled programs. Fixed Filters Fixed filters are specified by separate capabilities, such as cf, df, and gf. Mostly, these exist for historical reasons. Originally, the idea of LPD was that incoming jobs would be submitted with the type fields set to trigger whatever filter was desired. However, type codes are confusing and annoying to the user, who has to remember which option is needed to trigger which type. It is much easier to set up multiple queues with different names, and this is what most sites do these days. For example, originally a DVI fixed filter might be specified in a spool for lp, triggered by the option passed to lpr. Jobs without this option aren't acted on by the DVI filter. However, the same thing can be done by creating a queue named lp that doesn't have a DVI filter, and a queue named lpdvi which has the DVI filter specified in the if capability. Users just need to remember which queue to print to, instead of what option needed for this or that program. Output Filters These are specified by the of capability. Output filters are much more complicated than input filters and are hardly ever used in normal circumstances. They also generally require a compiled program somewhere, either directly specified or wrapped in a shell script, since they have to do their own signal-handling. Printing Raw UNIX Text with a Filter One of the first things that a new UNIX user will discover when plugging a standard LaserJet or impact printer into a UNIX system is the stairstep problem. The symptom is that the user dumps text to the printer, either through LPR or redirection (by catting it to the parallel device) and instead of receiving the expected Courier 10-point printout, gets a page with a single line of text, or two lines of text "stairstepped", text and nothing else. The problem is rooted in how printers and UNIX handle textfiles internally. Printers by and large follow the "MS-DOS Textfile" convention of requiring a carriage return, then a linefeed, at the end of every text line. This is a holdover from the early days when printers were mechanical devices, and the print head needed to return and the platen to advance to start a new line. UNIX uses only the linefeed character to terminate a text line. So, simply dumping raw text out the parallel port works on MS-DOS, but not on UNIX. If the printer is a PostScript printer, and doesn't support standard ASCII, then dumping UNIX text to it doesn't work. But then, neither would dumping MS-DOS text to it. (Raw text printing on PostScript printers is discussed later in this chapter.) Note also that if the printer is connected over the network to an HP JetDirect hardware print server, internal or external, the TEXT queue on the hardware print automatically adds the extra Carriage Return character to the end of a text line. If the printer is the garden-variety HP LaserJet, DeskJet, or an impact printer, and under DOS the administrator is used to printing raw text from the command line for directory listings, there are two ways to fix stairstep. The first is to send a command to the printer to make it print in "unix textfile" mode, which makes the printer supply its own carriage return. This solution is ugly in a printer environment with UNIX and Windows machines attempting to share use of the same printer. Switching the printer to work with UNIX disrupts DOS/Windows raw text printouts. The better solution is to use a simple filter that converts incoming text from UNIX style to DOS style. The following filter posted on questions@FreeBSD.org and the sample /etc/printcap entry can be used to do this: #!/bin/sh # /usr/local/libexec/crlfilter # # simple parlor trick to add CR to LF for printer # Every line of standard input is printed with CRLF # attached. # awk '{printf "%s\r\n", $0}' - An alternative filter posted using sed could be written as: #!/bin/sh # /usr/local/libexec/crlfilter # # Add CR to LF for printer # Every line of standard input is printed with CRLF # attached. # # Note, the ^M is a *real* ^M (^V^M if your typing in vi) # sed 's/$/^M/' - Here is an example of a filter that triggers the printers automatic LF-to-CR/LF converter (this option is only useful on HP LaserJets that support this command): #!/bin/sh # Simply copies stdin to stdout. Ignores all filter # arguments. # Tells printer to treat LF as CR+LF. Writes a form feed # character after printing job. printf "\033&k2G" && cat && printf "\f" && exit 0 exit 2 The printcap file used to trigger the filter is: #/etc/printcap # The trailer (tr) is used when the queue empties. I found that the # form feed (\f) was basically required for the HP to print properly. # Banners also need to be shut off. # lp|local line printer:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0:sd=/var/spool/output/lpd:lf=/var/log/lpd-errs: :if=/usr/local/libexec/crlfilter:sh:tr=\f:mx#0: # The <literal>pr</literal> filter Although most filters are built by scripts or programs and are added to the UNIX machine by the administrator, there is one filter that is supplied with the FreeBSD operating system is very useful for raw text files: the pr filter. It is most commonly used when printing from the UNIX command shell. The pr filter paginates and applies headers and footers to ASCII text files. It is automatically invoked with the option used with the lpr program at the UNIX command prompt. The pr filter is special - it runs in addition to any input filters specified for the print queue in /etc/printcap, if the user sets the option for a print job. This allows headers and pagination to be applied in addition to any special conversion, such as CR to CR/LF that a specified input filter may apply. Printing PostScript Banner Pages with a Filter. Unfortunately, the canned banner page supplied in the LPD program prints only on a text-compatible printer. If the attached printer understands only PostScript and the administrator wants to print banner pages, it is possible to install a filter into the /etc/printcap file to do this. The following filter is taken from the FreeBSD Handbook. I've slightly changed its invocation for a couple of reasons. First, some PostScript printers have difficulty when two print files are sent within the same print job or they lack the trailing Control-D. Second is that the handbook invocation uses the LPRPS program, which requires a serial connection to the printer. The following filter shows another trick: calling LPR from within a filter program to spin off another print job. Unfortunately, the problem with using this trick is that the banner page always gets printed after the job. This is because the incoming job spools first, and then FreeBSD runs the filter against it, so the banner page generated by the filter always spools behind the existing job. There are two scripts, both should be put in the /usr/local/libexec directory, and the modes set to executable. The printcap also must be modified to create the nonbanner and banner versions of the print queue. Following the scripts is the /etc/printcap file showing how they are called. Notice that the sh parameter is turned on since the actual printed banner is being generated on the fly by the filter: #!/bin/sh # Filename /usr/local/libexec/psbanner # parameter spacing comes from if= filter call template of: # if -c -w -l -i -n login -h host # parsing trickiness is to allow for the presence or absence of -c # sleep is in there for ickiness of some PostScript printers for dummy do case "$1" in -n) alogname="$2" ;; -h) ahostname="$2" ;; esac shift done /usr/local/libexec/make-ps-header $alogname $ahostname "PostScript" | \ lpr -P lpnobanner sleep 10 cat && exit 0 Here is the make-ps-header listing. #!/bin/sh # Filename /usr/local/libexec/make-ps-header # # These are PostScript units (72 to the inch). Modify for A4 or # whatever size paper you are using: # page_width=612 page_height=792 border=72 # # Save these, mostly for readability in the PostScript, below. # user=$1 host=$2 job=$3 date=`date` # # Send the PostScript code to stdout. # exec cat <<EOF %!PS % % Make sure we do not interfere with user's job that will follow % % % Make a thick, unpleasant border around the edge of the paper. % $border $border moveto $page_width $border 2 mul sub 0 rlineto 0 $page_height $border 2 mul sub rlineto currentscreen 3 -1 roll pop 100 3 1 roll setscreen $border 2 mul $page_width sub 0 rlineto closepath 0.8 setgray 10 setlinewidth stroke 0 setgray % % Display user's login name, nice and large and prominent % /Helvetica-Bold findfont 64 scalefont setfont $page_width ($user) stringwidth pop sub 2 div $page_height 200 sub moveto ($user) show % % Now show the boring particulars % /Helvetica findfont 14 scalefont setfont /y 200 def [ (Job:) (Host:) (Date:) ] { 200 y moveto show /y y 18 sub def } forall /Helvetica-Bold findfont 14 scalefont setfont /y 200 def [ ($job) ($host) ($date) ] { 270 y moveto show /y y 18 sub def } forall % % That is it % showpage Here is the /etc/printcap file. # lp|local line printer, PostScript, banner:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0:sd=/var/spool/output/lpd:lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:\ :if=/usr/local/libexec/psbanner:sh:mx#0: lpnobanner|local line printer, PostScript, no banner:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0:sd=/var/spool/output/lpd-noban:\ :lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:sh:mx#0: # Printer Accounting The FreeBSD print spooler can manage accounting statistics for printer usage. The spooler counts each page printed and generates totals for each user. In this manner departments or individuals can be charged money for their use of the printer. In the academic world, such as student computer labs, accounting is very political. Many schemes have been developed to attempt to gather statistics to charge people (generally students) for printing. Administrators in this environment who deal with printers can have almost as many accounting problems as printer problems. In the corporate environment, on the other hand, accounting is not as important. I strongly recommend against any corporation attempting to implement printer accounting on shared printers for a number of reasons: The entire UNIX accounting system is based on ASCII printouts. It is easy to count the number of ASCII pages, form feeds, or text lines in a print job. In corporations, however, PostScript and HPPCL are generally the order of the day. It is almost impossible to figure out by examining the datastream how many pages it will occupy, and even if this could be done accurately, it wastes significant computational resources. It is possible to get some PostScript printers to count pages, but doing so requires a bidirectional connection to the printer and additional programming on the UNIX system. This task is beyond the scope of this book. Banner pages aren't included in UNIX printer accounting counts. Therefore, someone submitting 20 two-page jobs uses much more paper than does someone submitting one 40 page job, yet both are charged the same amount. The username of the submitter can be easily forged, if the job is remotely submitted over the network from a client (practically all jobs in a Windows client printing environment are remotely submitted). Although some LPR clients can be set to authenticate, and the rs capability can be set to enforce authentication, not all can, especially Windows LPR clients. It is more difficult for a submitter to hide the IP number or machine name of the remote client, but in a Windows environment there is no guarantee that someone was sitting at a particular desktop machine when the job was submitted. A business generates no revenue by monitoring printer usage. In the academic community, however, when a student lab charges for printouts the lab is actually extracting money from an entity (the student) that is separate from the lab. Within a corporation, the concept of department A getting revenue from user B is pointless and doesn't generate a net gain for the corporation as a whole. For my printer administration, I have found that I can save more money on printing costs by purchasing supplies wisely than by attempting to discourage printing through "chargebacks". What is the sense of being miserly with printing while spending double on toner cartridges because no one is willing to comparison shop, or signing a "lease" agreement that isn't beneficial for the printer? When you get down to it, corporate users don't care much for print sharing anyway, and they generally only agree to it because the administrator can buy a far bigger, faster, and fancier printer than they can requisition. Worse yet, if usage on a shared printer is charged, it encourages employees to look for other places to print. Inevitably, people run out buy cheap inkjet printers for their own use, and the business ends up spending more on paper and supplies for many poor-quality small printers, than it would for a few decent big ones. Moreover, the inferior output of these printers makes the organization as a whole look bad. The corporate spirit should be one of teamwork, not bickering. The surest way to kill a network in a corporation is to set up a situation that puts the administrator into the policeman position or pits one department against another. The only justification I've ever seen for running accounting on corporate printers is using the accounting system to automate reminders to the administrator to replace paper, or toner. Aside from this use, a corporation that implements accounting as a way of encouraging employees not to waste paper ends up defeating the purpose of turning on accounting. Microsoft Networking Client printing with Samba Although LPR is a time-tested and truly cross-platform printing solution, sites with a majority of Windows clients running Microsoft Networking have an alternate printing mechanism—Samba. Samba can provide print services to clients running SMB-compatible network clients. With a running Samba installation, the administrator may "share out" printers as well as filesystem directories from the FreeBSD system. Printers accessed with Samba must be defined both in the /etc/printcap file and the /usr/local/etc/smb.conf file. If the individual printers are defined in the smb.conf file with the printer driver= statement set to the exact model name of the printer, the "Auto printer driver install" feature of Windows NT and Win95/98 is activated. This automatically loads the correct printer driver if the user clicks on the print queue in Network Neighborhood under Windows 95 or NT 4.0. The restriction, of course, is that the printer model must be in the Windows client driver database. The smb.conf file also defines the print command used to pass jobs to the UNIX print spool. It is a good idea to redefine this via the print command option to lpr -s -P %p %s; rm %s. This turns on soft linking, so that large print jobs don't get truncated. In operation, the SMB-networking client builds the print job on itself and then transfers the entire job over the network to the Samba server. On the server, Samba has its own temporary print spool directory to which the job is copied. Once the job has been completely received, it is then passed to the UNIX print spooler.
Microsoft Networking Client printing with Samba ,---------. | ======= | FreeBSD Server | ======= | +---------------------+ ,-----. +-----------+ | +---------------+ | | | | Printer [ ]------------[ ] | Samba | | |_____| +-----------+ Parallel | | Software | [ ]------_________ Cable | +---------------+ | / ::::::: \ | | `---------' | +---------------+ | Network PC | | Print | | | | Software | | | +---------------+ | +---------------------+ The Samba software and the print software run on the same host. Samba receives the print job, then hands it to the print spooler.
Client access issues Because a Windows client formats print jobs before sending them to the server, the administrator may want to hide some of the specialty print queues on the server. For example, the queue that converts LF to CRLF for UNIX text printouts would probably not be shared out. To make such queues invisible, the browseable=no option can be turned on in the smb.conf file. Also, the load printers option must be set to no to allow individual printer definitions. In general, the only print queues that should be visible through Samba are the "raw" print queues that are set up by the administrator to allow incoming preformatted print jobs. Windows clients that print to Samba print queues on the UNIX system can view and cancel print jobs in the print queue. They cannot pause them, however, which is a difference between Novell and Windows NT Server print queues. They also cannot prioritize print jobs from the print queue window, although the administrator can reprioritize print jobs that are in the queue from a command shell on the FreeBSD server. Printer entries in configuration files Following are listings of sample /etc/printcap and smb.conf files used on the system to provide print services. An explanation of the interaction of these files follows. <filename>/etc/printcap</filename> # # # The printer in lpt0 is a PostScript printer. The nec-crlf entry # is for testing the printer when it is switched into HP LaserJet III # mode. # lp|local line printer:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0:sd=/var/spool/output/lpd:\ :lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:sh:mx#0: # nec-crlf|NEC Silentwriter 95 in ASCII mode with UNIX text filter:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0:sd=/usr/lpdspool/nec-crlf:\ :lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:sh:mx#0:\ :if=/usr/local/libexec/crlfilter:tr=\f: # nec-raw|NEC Silentwriter 95 used for PostScript passthrough printing:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0:sd=/usr/lpdspool/nec-raw:\ :lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:sh:mx#0: # nec-ps-banner|NEC Silentwriter 95 with PostScript banner page created:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0:sd=/usr/lpdspool/nec-ps-banner:\ :lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:sh:mx#0:if=/usr/local/libexec/psbanner: # # <filename>/usr/local/etc/smb.conf</filename> [global] comment = FreeBSD - Samba %v log file = /var/log/samba.log dont descend = /dev,/proc,/root,/stand print command = lpr -s -P %p %s; rm %s interfaces = X.X.X.X (the system IP number goes here) printing = bsd map archive = no status = yes public = yes read only = no preserve case = yes strip dot = yes security = share guest ok = no password level = 1 dead time = 15 domain master = yes workgroup = WORKGROUP [homes] browseable = no comment = User Home Directory create mode = 0775 public = no [printers] path = /var/spool comment = Printers create mode = 0700 browseable = no read only = yes public = no [lp] printable = yes browseable = no [nec-raw] comment = Main PostScript printer driver for Windows clients printer driver = NEC SilentWriter 95 printable = yes browseable = yes [wwwroot] path = /usr/local/www read only = no create mode = 0775 comment = Internal Web Server Browsing output Following is the output of a net view command executed at a DOS prompt under Windows 95: Shared resources at \\SERVER Sharename Type Comment -------------------------------------------------------------------- nec-crlf Print NEC Silentwriter 95 in ASCII mode nec-raw Print Main PostScript printer driver tedm Disk User Home Directory wwwroot Disk Internal Web Server The command was completed successfully. In the /etc/printcap file four print queues are defined, all tied to the printer plugged into the parallel port on the FreeBSD server. The first is lp, the generic local line printer. Since this print queue generally has a filter placed on it to format jobs from the UNIX print queue properly, it should not be visible on the SMB network (i.e., visible in Network Neighborhood). The second queue, nec-crlf, has a filter that converts UNIX text to text that prints without stairstepping, so it also should be hidden from the SMB network. The third, nec-raw, should be visible on the network because this is the spool that the Windows clients use. The last queue, nec-ps-banner, is another specialty queue for UNIX local printing and thus should not be visible. When the smb.conf file is parsed, the default entry [printers] is first read and used as a set of defaults for printers that are going to be shared out. Next, the /etc/printcap file is read to get a list of all printers on the server. Last, each printer is checked for a service name in the smb.conf file that contains settings that override the set of defaults. In the listing of what resources are visible on the network, both nec-crlf and nec-raw print queues are visible, and lp and nec-ps-banner is not. lp is not visible because there is a specific entry, [lp] in the smb.conf file that blocks it. nec-ps-banner doesn't have such an entry, but because the print queue name is not a legal length for a SMB name, it isn't shared out either. The nec-crlf printer is visible so as to illustrate another point - comments. If a print queue has no entry in the smb.conf file and is built by scanning the /etc/printcap file and using the [printers] defaults, the comment is taken from the /etc/printcap file next to the queue definition name. Otherwise, if an entry is made for the printer in the smb.conf file the comment is taken from the entry in smb.conf. Printing between NT Server/NetWare and FreeBSD. Up to this point in the chapter, our main concern has been FreeBSD and Windows NT printing interoperability with NT as a print client passing jobs to the FreeBSD system. What happens if the situation is reversed and the FreeBSD system is itself a printing client of another LPD server? This situation can arise in a mixed UNIX/NetWare or UNIX/NT environment. The administrator may elect to forgo the use of Samba, and use an NT server to provide print services. Alternatively, the administrator may have existing DOS Novell IPX clients that they don't want to change, printing to an existing IPX Novell NetWare server. Many of the earlier hardware print servers, such as the Intel NetPort 1 and NetPort 2 were IPX only. A site with a large number of these hardware servers may wish to move the clients to TCP/IP, but leave the existing IPX-based printing network intact. With NetWare it is possible to load an LPD NetWare loadable module (NLM) on the NetWare server that takes incoming LPR print jobs and prints them on IPX print queues. Later versions of NetWare may include this NLM, it was an extra cost add-on with NetWare 3.X With Windows NT Server, loading the TCP/IP LPR printing support also loads the LPD print server on NT. By using LPR client programs on UNIX, it is possible to submit, view status, and remove jobs remotely from an NT server that has LPR installed as a port for its printers. Following is a sample /etc/printcap file entry that defines a print queue named tank on the FreeBSD system pointed to an NT LPD server queue named sherman on a NT Server named big.army.mil in the DNS. This uses the rm printcap capability. Unlike the earlier examples, the output print jobs are sent out not by the PC parallel port but over the network to the NT server. # tank|sample remote printer:\ :rm=big.army.mil:rp=sherman:sd=/var/spool/output/lphost:\ :lf=/var/log/lpd-errs: # When using an NT server as an LPD server it may be necessary to make the NT registry changes mentioned under Windows NT Registry Changes, earlier in the chapter. Printing from UNIX Two commands used at the FreeBSD command prompt are intended as general-purpose print commands: lp and lpr. <command>lp</command> The lp command is simply a front end command that calls the lpr command with appropriate options. Its main use is to allow the running of precompiled binary programs and scripts that assume that the lp command is the official printing command. <command>lpr</command> The lpr command is the main command that is used to print files from the command prompts under the FreeBSD operating system. It is frequently spawned off as a child program, or used in pipes. For example, when the Netscape web browser's Print button is clicked, Netscape may create the PostScript output, but the output goes through the lpr command. The lpr command, like many UNIX command-line printing programs, assumes that the default print queue name is lp. When the FreeBSD machine is set up, the administrator usually sets the lp queue to print through a filter that allows raw UNIX text sent to it to print properly. For example, if an HP LaserJet printer that doesn't have PostScript is connected to the server, the lp queue specifies in the /etc/printcap file the CRLF filter listed earlier. On the other hand, if an Apple Laserwriter that doesn't support ASCII is connected to the server, the a2psfilter would be specified in the /etc/printcap for the lp queue. When printing raw text files usually the option is specified to lpr. When printing preformatted files, such as PostScript files, the option is used, which selects whatever queue is used to handle these job types. Managing the UNIX Print Queue Once the print jobs coming in from clients are received on the FreeBSD system and placed in the print spool, they are metered out at a slower rate to the various printers. If traffic activity is light, and few print jobs get sent through, the administrator can probably ignore the print queue as long as it continues to work. However, a busy network printer running at an optimal rate of speed usually has a backlog of unprinted jobs in the queue waiting for print time. To keep all users happy and to provide for the occasional rush print job, the UNIX LPD/LPR printing system has several administration commands which are described here. Viewing the queue On busy printers, and to troubleshoot stopped printers, users sometimes need to view the print jobs in the queue. Administrators also need to view the queue to see what jobs may need to be expedited. This can be done from the workstation that remotely submitted the job if the LPR client has the ability to do this. The Windows 3.1 LPR client discussed earlier has this capability. Unfortunately, many LPR clients don't, which means that the administrator must Telnet into the UNIX machine that the print queues are on and view them there. The UNIX shell command used to view the queue is the lpq command. It is frequently run as lpq -a which shows jobs in all queues. The following is a sample output of the command: &prompt.root; lpq -a nec-raw: Rank Owner Job Files Total Size 1st tedm 19 C:/WLPRSPL/SPOOL/~LP00018.TMP 105221 bytes 2nd tedm 20 C:/WLPRSPL/SPOOL/~LP00019.TMP 13488 bytes 3rd root 3 hosts 1220 bytes 4th tedm 1 Printer Test Page 765 bytes 5th tedm 2 Microsoft Word - CHAPTE10.DOC 15411 bytes The first two jobs and the last two jobs came from remote clients, the third came from the command prompt. Removing print jobs Deleting unwanted print jobs that haven't yet printed from the queue can be done by the remote workstations that submitted the job if their LPR implementations have the necessary commands. The Windows 3.1 LPR client I detailed earlier has this capability. Many LPR clients don't, however, which means that the administrator must Telnet into the UNIX machine that the print queues are on and delete the jobs there. The administrator can delete any print jobs from any queues by running the lprm command followed by the specified print queue and the job number. Below is a sample output of the command: &prompt.root; lprm -P nec-raw 19 dfA019tedmitte dequeued cfA019dostest dequeued &prompt.root; lprm -P nec-raw 3 dfA003toybox.placo.com dequeued cfA003toybox.placo.com dequeued The lprm command is also used under UNIX to delete remote print jobs. Advanced management The administrator logged into the FreeBSD system as the root user can also perform several other operations that ordinary users cannot. These include turning the queues on and off, and moving print jobs within the print queues. The command used to do this is the lpc command. lpc has two modes of operation. In the first mode, the command is run by itself, which puts the administrator into an lpc prompt. Some general help is available for the commands, such as the following sample output: &prompt.root; lpc lpc> help Commands may be abbreviated. Commands are: abort enable disable help restart status topq ? clean exit down quit start stop up lpc> help disable disable turn a spooling queue off lpc> help status status show status of daemon and queue lpc> exit In the second mode of operation the lpc command is just run by itself, followed by the command and the print queue name. Following is a sample output: &prompt.root; lpc disable lp lp: queuing disabled Under FreeBSD, there is no command that specifically allows the administrator to move jobs from one queue to another. This can be done, however, by changing into the raw queue directory then rerunning the lpr command. Following is a sample run showing three print jobs moved from a dysfunctional queue to a good one: &prompt.root; lpq -a lp: Warning: lp is down: printing disabled printing disabled Rank Owner Job Files Total Size 1st root 51 hosts 1220 bytes 2nd root 52 services 60767 bytes 3rd root 53 printcap 2383 bytes &prompt.root; cd /var/spool/output/lpd &prompt.root; ls .seq cfA053toybox.placo.com dfA053toybox.placo.com cfA051toybox.placo.com dfA051toybox.placo.com lock cfA052toybox.placo.com dfA052toybox.placo.com status &prompt.root; lpr -P nec-raw dfA051toybox.placo.com &prompt.root; lpr -P nec-raw dfA052toybox.placo.com &prompt.root; lpr -P nec-raw dfA053toybox.placo.com &prompt.root; lprm -P lp - &prompt.root; lpq -a nec-raw: Warning: nec-raw is down: printing disabled Warning: no daemon present Rank Owner Job Files Total Size 1st root 5 dfA051toybox.placo.com 1220 bytes 2nd root 6 dfA052toybox.placo.com 60767 bytes 3rd root 7 dfA053toybox.placo.com 2383 bytes Moving jobs from queue to queue is feasible only when all printers are similar, as when all printers support PostScript. Remote Management Just as the root user can manipulate remotely submitted jobs in the print queue, print jobs can be remotely managed by regular users with the LPR clients that created them. Unfortunately, some LPR clients, such as the ACITS LPR client for Win95, don't have enough programming to be able to do this. Others, like the Win31 client, can manipulate the print jobs remotely. FreeBSD offers some level of protection against inadvertent deletion of print jobs from remote hosts by restricting manipulation of a job to the same host that originated it. Even if the owner of the job matches a local user account on the server, for an ordinary user to delete remotely submitted print jobs, the request still must come from the remote host. Advanced Printing Topics The FreeBSD UNIX LPR/LPD printing system is very flexible, and, with the addition of filters, can be adapted to very unusual printing environments. To enhance this flexibility, several useful printing utilities are supplied on the FreeBSD CDROM which the administrator might wish to install. Ghostscript The Ghostscript program, invoked as /usr/local/bin/gs, is one of the most useful printing utilities that have been developed for the free software community. Ghostscript reads incoming PostScript data, (or Adobe PDF files) interprets it, and outputs it as a raster image. This can be displayed on screen, for example, with the GhostView program under the X Window system, or printed on most graphics printers, such as Epson dot-matrix, HP DeskJet, or HP LaserJet. In effect, it is a way of adding PostScript printing capability to a printer that doesn't have PostScript firmware code. Ghostscript has been ported to numerous operating systems including Windows. The Ghostscript home page is located at and contains the most current version of the program. A prebuilt FreeBSD binary of Ghostscript is located in the Packages section of the FreeBSD CDROM. This can be installed on the FreeBSD system by selecting the package from the prepackaged software list that is accessed through the /stand/sysinstall installation program. Many packaged programs on the CD depend on GhostScript, and so it may already be installed. Installation of the packaged version of GhostScript is recommended in the FreeBSD ports Section because it has been tested with the other packages that require it. The package creates a directory containing some documentation files in /usr/local/share/ghostscript/X.XX/doc. Unfortunately, because of the packaging process on the FreeBSD CDROM not all the useful installation files are copied into this location. So, if the package was version 5.03 (for example) the administrator will also want to get the file , and unzip and untar it into a temporary directory. Extracting the archive file creates a directory structure under the gs5.03 subdirectory. To install ghostscript in the /etc/printcap file, read the gs5.03/devs.mak file to determine which printer driver definition works with your printer and then use the following instructions: Change to the root user with su. In the gs5.03 directory, copy the lprsetup.sh, unix-lpr.txt, and unix-lpr.sh files to /usr/local/share/ghostscript/5.03. Change to the /usr/local/share/ghostscript/5.03 directory. Edit lprsetup.sh with a text editor such as vi. Modify the DEVICES= entries to list your selected printer driver definitions per the instructions in unix-lpr.txt. Modify the PRINTERDEV= to /dev/lpt0, and the GSDIR= to /usr/local/share/ghostscript, and the SPOOLDIR= to /var/spool/output. Save the file. Edit the unix-lpr.sh file and change the PSFILTERPATH= to /usr/local/share/ghostscript. If the printer that you defined in the lprsetup.sh file is a monochrome printer, remove the "-dBitsPerPixel=${bpp}" and "$colorspec" entries on the gs invocation line and save the file. Otherwise, if it is a color definition leave them in. For example, the following line is for a monochrome LaserJet: ") | gs -q -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=${device} \" Don't remove anything else. Exit the editor, and save the unix-lpr.sh file. Copy the unix-lpr.sh file to the parent directory, /usr/local/share/ghostscript and set the execute bit on it. Set the execute bit on lprsetup.sh with chmod and run the file by typing ./lprsetup.sh. Follow the instructions on creating the Spool directories. If you will be using accounting and a separate log file, run the touch command to create the empty files per directions in script output. The sample /etc/printcap is located in the current directory; the filename is printcap.insert. Use this as a template to modify the /etc/printcap file. A sample /etc/printcap file for a LaserJet 3 is below: # # ljet3.raw|Raw output device ljet3 for Ghostscript:\ :rm=big.army.mil:rp=sherman:sd=/var/spool/output/ljet3/raw:\ :mx#0:sf:sh:rs: # ljet3|Ghostscript device ljet3 (output to ljet3.raw):\ :lp=/dev/null:sd=/var/spool/output/ljet3:\ :lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:mx#0:sf:sh:rs:\ :if=/usr/local/share/ghostscript/filt/indirect/ljet3/gsif:\ :af=/var/spool/output/ljet3/acct: # a2ps filter Another handy utility is the a2ps filter, short for ASCII-to-PostScript. This program takes an incoming ASCII datastream and converts it into PostScript. It can also print multiple pages on a single sheet of paper by shrinking them down. It is a useful tool for a printer that cannot interpret ASCII, such as a PostScript-only printer. A2ps is not installed in the FreeBSD system by default; it is located in the ports section /usr/ports/print/a2ps43. A prepackaged binary can be installed with /stand/sysinstall but I have had problems with that port. It is best to install it by running make in the a2ps43 ports directory. A printcap entry and filter using this follow: <filename>/etc/printcap</filename> # lp|local line printer with output dumped through a2ps for raw listings:\ :lp=/dev/lpt0:sd=/var/spool/output/lpd:lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:sh:mx#0:\ :if=/usr/local/libexec/ascii2postscript: # <filename>/usr/local/libexec/ascii2postscript</filename> #!/bin/sh # # Simple filter that converts ASCII to PostScript for basic stuff like # directory listings. # /usr/local/bin/a2ps && exit 0 exit 2 Read the system manual page for a2ps to see the options available with this program, and remember to set the filter script ascii2postscript all-executable. Miscellaneous The large number of other printing utilities cannot be covered here. Some add features such as automatic job type sensing, others handle bidirectional communication between the server and the printer. There are also a few other experimental LPR printing replacement systems. Commands such as ghostscript and a2ps can also be used in pipes that create pretty output on an ordinary impact printer. One last hint - the system manual pages can be printed with the option which turns their ordinary ASCII output to beautifully formatted PostScript. Try the command man -t man and send the output through GhostScript or a PostScript printer for easier to read manual pages. diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/dev-model/book.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/dev-model/book.sgml index c343c4a90b..0ca46b9a4f 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/dev-model/book.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/dev-model/book.sgml @@ -1,2721 +1,2721 @@ %books.ent; %chapters; ]> A project model for the FreeBSD Project Niklas Saers 2002-2005 Niklas Saers 1.2 April, 2005 Update one year of changes, replace statistics with those of 2004 1.1 July, 2004 First update within the FreeBSD tree 1.0 December 4th, 2003 Ready for commit to FreeBSD Documentation 0.7 April 7th, 2003 Release for review by the Documentation team 0.6 March 1st, 2003 Incorporated corrections noted by interviewees and reviewers 0.5 February 1st, 2003 Initial review by interviewees Foreword Up until now, the FreeBSD project has released a number of described techniques to do different parts of work. However, a project model summarising how the project is structured is needed because of the increasing amount of project members. This goes hand-in-hand with Brooks' law that adding another person to a late project will make it later since it will increase the communication needs . A project model is a tool to reduce the communication needs. This paper will provide such a project model and is donated to the FreeBSD Documentation project where it can evolve together with the project so that it can at any point in time reflect the way the project works. It is based on . I would like to thank the following people for taking the time to explain things that were unclear to me and for proofreading the document. Andrey A. Chernov ache@freebsd.org Bruce A. Mah bmah@freebsd.org Dag-Erling Smørgrav des@freebsd.org Giorgos Keramidaskeramida@freebsd.org Ingvil Hovig ingvil.hovig@skatteetaten.no Jesper Holckjeh.inf@cbs.dk John Baldwin jhb@freebsd.org John Polstra jdp@freebsd.org Kirk McKusick mckusick@freebsd.org Mark Linimon linimon@freebsd.org Marleen Devos Niels Jørgenssennielsj@ruc.dk Nik Clayton nik@freebsd.org Poul-Henning Kamp phk@freebsd.org Simon L. Nielsen simon@freebsd.org Overview A project model is a means to reduce the communications overhead in a project. As shown by , increasing the number of project participants increases the communication in the project exponentionally. FreeBSD has during the past few years increased both its mass of active users and committers, and the communication in the project has risen accordingly. This project model will serve to reduce this overhead by providing an up-to-date description of the project. During the Core elections in 2002, Mark Murray stated I am opposed to a long rule-book, as that satisfies lawyer-tendencies, and is counter to the technocentricity that the project so badly needs. . This project model is not meant to be a tool to justify creating impositions for developers, but as a tool to facilitate coordination. It is meant as a description of the project, with an overview of how the different processes are executed. It is an introduction to how the FreeBSD project works. The FreeBSD project model will be described as of July 1st, 2004. It is based on the Niels Jørgensen's paper , FreeBSD's official documents, discussions on FreeBSD mailing lists and interviews with developers. After providing definitions of terms used, this document will outline the organisational structure (including role descriptions and communication lines), discuss the methodology model and after presenting the tools used for process control, it will present the defined processes. Finally it will outline major sub-projects of the FreeBSD project. , Section 1.2 and 1.3 give the vision and the architectural guidelines for the project. The vision is To produce the best UNIX-like operating system package possible, with due respect to the original software tools ideology as well as usability, performance and stability. The architectural guidelines help determine whether a problem that someone wants to be solved is within the scope of the project Definitions
Activity An activity is an element of work performed during the course of a project . It has an output and leads towards an outcome. Such an output can either be an input to another activity or a part of the process' delivery.
Process A process is a series of activities that lead towards a particular outcome. A process can consist of one or more sub-processes. An example of a process is software design.
Hat A hat is synonymous with role. A hat has certain responsibilities in a process and for the process outcome. The hat executes activities. It is well defined what issues the hat should be contacted about by the project members and people outside the project.
Outcome An outcome is the final output of the process. This is synonymous with deliverable, that is defined as any measurable, tangible, verifiable outcome, result or item that must be produced to complete a project or part of a project. Often used more narrowly in reference to an external deliverable, which is a deliverable that is subject to approval by the project sponsor or customer by . Examples of outcomes are a piece of software, a decision made or a report written.
FreeBSD When saying FreeBSD we will mean the BSD derivative UNIX-like operating system FreeBSD, whereas when saying the FreeBSD Project we will mean the project organisation.
Organisational structure While no-one takes ownership of FreeBSD, the FreeBSD organisation is divided into core, committers and contributors and is part of the FreeBSD community that lives around it.
The FreeBSD Project's structure
Number of committers has been determined by going through CVS logs from January 1st, 2004 to December 31st, 2004 and contributors by going through the list of contributions and problem reports. The main resource in the FreeBSD community is its developers: the committers and contributors. It is with their contributions that the project can move forward. Regular developers are referred to as contributors. As by January 1st, 2003, there are an estimated 5500 contributors on the project. Committers are developers with the privilege of being able to commit changes. These are usually the most active developers who are willing to spend their time not only integrating their own code but integrating code submitted by the developers who do not have this privilege. They are also the developers who elect the core team, and they have access to closed discussions. The project can be grouped into four distinct separate parts, and most developers will focus their involvement in one part of FreeBSD. The four parts are kernel development, userland development, ports and documentation. When referring to the base system, both kernel and userland is meant. This split changes our triangle to look like this:
The FreeBSD Project's structure with committers in categories
Number of committers per area has been determined by going through CVS logs from January 1st, 2004 to December 31st, 2004. Note that many committers work in multiple areas, making the total number higher than the real number of committers. The total number of committers at that time was 269. Committers fall into three groups: committers who are only concerned with one area of the project (for instance file systems), committers who are involved only with one sub-project and committers who commit to different parts of the code, including sub-projects. Because some committers work on different parts, the total number in the committers section of the triangle is higher than in the above triangle. The kernel is the main building block of FreeBSD. While the userland applications are protected against faults in other userland applications, the entire system is vulnerable to errors in the kernel. This, combined with the vast amount of dependencies in the kernel and that it is not easy to see all the consequences of a kernel change, demands developers with a relative full understanding of the kernel. Multiple development efforts in the kernel also requires a closer coordination than userland applications do. The core utilities, known as userland, provide the interface that identifies FreeBSD, both user interface, shared libraries and external interfaces to connecting clients. Currently, 162 people are involved in userland development and maintenance, many being maintainers for their own part of the code. Maintainership will be discussed in the section. Documentation is handled by and includes all documents surrounding the FreeBSD project, including the web pages. There were during 2004 101 people making commits to the FreeBSD Documentation Project. Ports is the collection of meta-data that is needed to make software packages build correctly on FreeBSD. An example of a port is the port for the web-browser Mozilla. It contains information about where to fetch the source, what patches to apply and how, and how the package should be installed on the system. This allows automated tools to fetch, build and install the package. As of this writing, there are more than 12600 ports available. Statistics are generated by counting the number of entries in the file fetched by portsdb by April 1st, 2005. portsdb is a part of the port sysutils/portupgrade. , ranging from web servers to games, programming languages and most of the application types that are in use on modern computers. Ports will be discussed further in the section . Methodology model
Development model There is no defined model for how people write code in FreeBSD. However, Niels Jørgenssen has suggested a model of how written code is integrated into the project.
Jørgenssen's model for change integration
The development release is the FreeBSD-CURRENT ("-CURRENT") branch and the production release is the FreeBSD-STABLE branch ("-STABLE") . This is a model for one change, and shows that after coding, developers seek community review and try integrating it with their own systems. After integrating the change into the development release, called FreeBSD-CURRENT, it is tested by many users and developers in the FreeBSD community. After it has gone through enough testing, it is merged into the production release, called FreeBSD-STABLE. Unless each stage is finished successfully, the developer needs to go back and make modifications in the code and restart the process. To integrate a change with either -CURRENT or -STABLE is called making a commit. Jørgensen found that most FreeBSD developers work individually, meaning that this model is used in parallel by many developers on the different ongoing development efforts. A developer can also be working on multiple changes, so that while he is waiting for review or people to test one or more of his changes, he may be writing another change. As each commit represents an increment, this is a massively incremental model. The commits are in fact so frequent that during one year The period from January 1st, 2004 to December 31st, 2004 was examined to find this number. , 85427 commits were made, making a daily average of 233 commits. Within the code bracket in Jørgensen's figure, each programmer has his own working style and follows his own development models. The bracket could very well have been called development as it includes requirements gathering and analysis, system and detailed design, implementation and verification. However, the only output from these stages is the source code or system documentation. From a stepwise model's perspective (such as the waterfall model), the other brackets can be seen as further verification and system integration. This system integration is also important to see if a change is accepted by the community. Up until the code is committed, the developer is free to choose how much to communicate about it to the rest of the project. In order for -CURRENT to work as a buffer (so that bright ideas that had some undiscovered drawbacks can be backed out) the minimum time a commit should be in -CURRENT before merging it to -STABLE is 3 days. Such a merge is referred to as an MFC (Merge From Current). It is important to notice the word change. Most commits do not contain radical new features, but are maintenance updates. The only exceptions from this model are security fixes and changes to features that are deprecated in the -CURRENT branch. In these cases, changes can be committed directly to the -STABLE branch. In addition to many people working on the project, there are many related projects to the FreeBSD Project. These are either projects developing brand new features, sub-projects or projects whose outcome is incorporated into FreeBSD For instance, the development of the Bluetooth stack started as a sub-project until it was deemed stable enough to be merged into the -CURRENT branch. Now it is a part of the core FreeBSD system. . These projects fit into the FreeBSD Project just like regular development efforts: they produce code that is integrated with the FreeBSD Project. However, some of them (like Ports and Documentation) have the privilege of being applicable to both branches or commit directly to both -CURRENT and -STABLE. There is no standards to how design should be done, nor is design collected in a centralised repository. The main design is that of 4.4BSD. According to Kirk McKusick, after 20 years of developing UNIX operating systems, the interfaces are for the most part figured out. There is therefore no need for much design. However, new applications of the system and new hardware leads to some implementations being more beneficial than those that used to be preferred. One example is the introduction of web browsing that made the normal TCP/IP connection a short burst of data rather than a steady stream over a longer period of time. As design is a part of the Code bracket in Jørgenssen's model, it is up to every developer or sub-project how this should be done. Even if the design should be stored in a central repository, the output from the design stages would be of limited use as the differences of methodologies would make them poorly if at all interoperable. For the overall design of the project, the project relies on the sub-projects to negotiate fit interfaces between each other rather than to dictate interfacing.
Release branches The releases of FreeBSD is best illustrated by a tree with many branches where each major branch represents a major version. Minor versions are represented by branches of the major branches. In the following release tree, arrows that follow one-another in a particular direction represent a branch. Boxes with full lines and diamonds represent official releases. Boxes with dotted lines represent the development branch at that time. Security branches are represented by ovals. Diamonds differ from boxes in that they represent a fork, meaning a place where a branch splits into two branches where one of the branches becomes a sub-branch. For example, at 4.0-RELEASE the 4.0-CURRENT branch split into 4-STABLE and 5.0-CURRENT. At 4.5-RELEASE, the branch forked off a security branch called RELENG_4_5.
The FreeBSD release tree
The latest -CURRENT version is always referred to as -CURRENT, while the latest -STABLE release is always referred to as -STABLE. In this figure, -STABLE refers to 4-STABLE while -CURRENT refers to 5.0-CURRENT following 5.0-RELEASE. A major release is always made from the -CURRENT branch. However, the -CURRENT branch does not need to fork at that point in time, but can focus on stabilising. An example of this is that following 3.0-RELEASE, 3.1-RELEASE was also a continuation of the -CURRENT-branch, and -CURRENT did not become a true development branch until this version was released and the 3-STABLE branch was forked. When -CURRENT returns to becoming a development branch, it can only be followed by a major release. 5-STABLE is predicted to be forked off 5.0-CURRENT at around 5.3-RELEASE. It is not until 5-STABLE is forked that the development branch will be branded 6.0-CURRENT. A minor release is made from the -CURRENT branch following a major release, or from the -STABLE branch. Following and including, 4.3-RELEASE The first release this actually happened for was 4.5-RELEASE, but security branches were at the same time created for 4.3-RELEASE and 4.4-RELEASE. , when a minor release has been made, it becomes a security branch. This is meant for organisations that do not want to follow the -STABLE branch and the potential new/changed features it offers, but instead require an absolutely stable environment, only updating to implement security updates. There is a terminology overlap with respect to the word "stable", which leads to some confusion. The -STABLE branch is still a development branch, whose goal is to be useful for most people. If it is never acceptable for a system to get changes that are not announced at the time it is deployed, that system should run a security branch. Each update to a security branch is called a patchlevel. For every security enhancement that is done, the patchlevel number is increased, making it easy for people tracking the branch to see what security enhancements they have implemented. In cases where there have been especially serious security flaws, an entire new release can be made from a security branch. An example of this is 4.6.2-RELEASE.
Model summary To summarise, the development model of FreeBSD can be seen as the following tree:
The overall development model
The tree of the FreeBSD development with ongoing development efforts and continuous integration. The tree symbolises the release versions with major versions spawning new main branches and minor versions being versions of the main branch. The top branch is the -CURRENT branch where all new development is integrated, and the -STABLE branch is the branch directly below it. Clouds of development efforts hang over the project where developers use the development models they see fit. The product of their work is then integrated into -CURRENT where it undergoes parallel debugging and is finally merged from -CURRENT into -STABLE. Security fixes are merged from -STABLE to the security branches.
Hats Many committers have a special area of responsibility. These roles are called hats . These hats can be either project roles, such as public relations officer, or maintainer for a certain area of the code. Because this is a project where people give voluntarily of their spare time, people with assigned hats are not always available. They must therefore appoint a deputy that can perform the hat's role in his or her absence. The other option is to have the role held by a group. Many of these hats are not formalised. Formalised hats have a charter stating the exact purpose of the hat along with its privileges and responsibilities. The writing of such charters is a new part of the project, and has thus yet to be completed for all hats. These hat descriptions are not such a formalisation, rather a summary of the role with links to the charter where available and contact addresses.
General Hats
Contributor A Contributor contributes to the FreeBSD project either as a developer, as an author, by sending problem reports, or in other ways contributing to the progress of the project. A contributor has no special privileges in the FreeBSD project.
Committer A person who has the required privileges to add his code or documentation to the repository. A committer has made a commit within the past 12 months. An active committer is a committer who has made an average of one commit per month during that time. It is worth noting that there are no technical barriers to prevent someone, once having gained commit privileges to the main- or a sub-project, to make commits in parts of that project's source the committer did not specifically get permission to modify. However, when wanting to make modifications to parts a committer has not been involved in before, he/she should read the logs to see what has happened in this area before, and also read the MAINTAINER file to see if the maintainer of this part has any special requests on how changes in the code should be made
Core Team The core team is elected by the committers from the pool of committers and serves as the board of directors of the FreeBSD project. It promotes active contributors to committers, assigns people to well-defined hats, and is the final arbiter of decisions involving which way the project should be heading. As by July 1st, 2004, core consisted of 9 members. Elections are held every two years.
Maintainership Maintainership means that that person is responsible for what is allowed to go into that area of the code and has the final say should disagreements over the code occur. This involves involves proactive work aimed at stimulating contributions and reactive work in reviewing commits. With the FreeBSD source comes the MAINTAINERS file that contains a one-line summary of how each maintainer would like contributions to be made. Having this notice and contact information enables developers to focus on the development effort rather than being stuck in a slow correspondence should the maintainer be unavailable for some time. If the maintainer is unavailable for an unreasonably long period of time, and other people do a significant amount of work, maintainership may be switched without the maintainer's approval. This is based on the stance that maintainership should be demonstrated, not declared. Maintainership of a particular piece of code is a hat that is not held as a group.
Official Hats The official hats in the FreeBSD Project are hats that are more or less formalised and mainly administrative roles. They have the authority and responsibility for their area. The following illustration shows the responsibility lines. After this follows a description of each hat, including who it is held by.
Overview of official hats
All boxes consist of groups of committers, except for the dotted boxes where the holders are not necessarily committers. The flattened circles are sub-projects and consist of both committers and non-committers of the main project.
Documentation project manager architect is responsible for defining and following up documentation goals for the committers in the Documentation project. Hat held by: The DocEng team doceng@FreeBSD.org. The DocEng Charter.
CVSup Mirror Site Coordinator The CVSup Mirror Site Coordinator coordinates all the s to ensure that they are distributing current versions of the software, that they have the capacity to update themselves when major updates are in progress, and making it easy for the general public to find their closest CVSup mirror. Hat currently held by: The CVSup-master team cvsup-master@FreeBSD.org.
Internationalisation The Internationalisation hat is responsible for coordinating the localisation efforts of the FreeBSD kernel and userland utilities. The translation effort are coordinated by . The Internationalisation hat should suggest and promote standards and guidelines for writing and maintaining the software in a fashion that makes it easier to translate. Hat currently available.
Postmaster The Postmaster is responsible for mail being correctly delivered to the committers' email address. He is also responsible for ensuring that the mailing lists work and should take measures against possible disruptions of mail such as having troll-, spam- and virus-filters. Hat currently held by: &a.dhw;.
Quality Assurance The responsibilities of this role are to manage the quality assurance measures. Hat currently held by: Robert Watson rwatson@FreeBSD.org.
Release Coordination The responsibilities of the Release Engineering Team are Setting, publishing and following a release schedule for official releases Documenting and formalising release engineering procedures Creation and maintenance of code branches Coordinating with the Ports and Documentation teams to have an updated set of packages and documentation released with the new releases Coordinating with the Security team so that pending releases are not affected by recently disclosed vulnerabilities. Further information about the development process is available in the section. Hat held by: the Release Engineering team re@FreeBSD.org. The current Release Engineer is Ken Smith kensmith@FreeBSD.org. The Release Engineering Charter.
Public Relations & Corporate Liaison The Public Relations & Corporate Liaison's responsibilities are: Making press statements when happenings that are important to the FreeBSD Project happen. Being the official contact person for corporations that are working close with the FreeBSD Project. Take steps to promote FreeBSD within both the Open Source community and the corporate world. Handle the freebsd-advocacy mailing list. This hat is currently not occupied.
Security Officer The Security Officer's main responsibility is to coordinate information exchange with others in the security community and in the FreeBSD project. The Security Officer is also responsible for taking action when security problems are reported and promoting proactive development behaviour when it comes to security. Because of the fear that information about vulnerabilities may leak out to people with malicious intent before a patch is available, only the Security Officer, consisting of an officer, a deputy and two members, receive sensitive information about security issues. However, to create or implement a patch, the Security Officer has the Security Officer Team security-team@FreeBSD.org to help do the work. Hat held by: the Security Officer security-officer@FreeBSD.org, currently headed by Colin Percival cperciva@FreeBSD.org. The Security Officer and The Security Officer Team's charter.
Source Repository Manager The Source Repository Manager is the only one who is allowed to directly modify the repository without using the tool. It is his/her responsibility to ensure that technical problems that arise in the repository are resolved quickly. The source repository manager has the authority to back out commits if this is necessary to resolve a CVS technical problem. Hat held by: the Source Repository Manager cvs@FreeBSD.org, currently headed by Peter Wemm peter@FreeBSD.org.
Election Manager The Election Manager is responsible for the process. The manager is responsible for running and maintaining the election system, and is the final authority should minor unforseen events happen in the election process. Major unforseen events have to be discussed with the Hat held only during elections.
Web site Management The Web site Management hat is responsible for coordinating the rollout of updated web pages on mirrors around the world, for the overall structure of the primary web site and the system it is running upon. The management needs to coordinate the content with and acts as maintainer for the www tree. Hat held by: the FreeBSD Webmasters www@FreeBSD.org.
Ports Manager The Ports Manager acts as a liaison between and the core project, and all requests from the project should go to the ports manager. Hat held by: the Ports Management Team portmgr@FreeBSD.org. The Portmgr charter.
Standards The Standards hat is responsible for ensuring that FreeBSD complies with the standards it is committed to , keeping up to date on the development of these standards and notifying FreeBSD developers of important changes that allows them to take a proactive role and decrease the time between a standards update and FreeBSD's compliancy. Hat currently held by: Garrett Wollman wollman@FreeBSD.org.
Core Secretary The Core Secretary's main responsibility is to write drafts to and publish the final Core Reports. The secretary also keeps the core agenda, thus ensuring that no balls are dropped unresolved. Hat currently held by: &a.philip;.
GNATS Administrator The GNATS Administrator is responsible for ensuring that the maintenance database is in working order, that the entries are correctly categorised and that there are no invalid entries. Hat currently held by: the Bugmeister Team bugmeister@FreeBSD.org.
Bugmeister The Bugmeister is the person in charge of the problem report group. Hat currently held by: the Bugmeister Team bugmeister@FreeBSD.org,
Donations Liaison Officer The task of the donations liason officer is to match the developers with needs with people or organisations willing to make a donation. The Donations Liason Charter is available here Hat held by: the Donations Liaison Office donations@FreeBSD.org, currently headed by Michael W. Lucas mwlucas@FreeBSD.org.
Admin (Also called FreeBSD Cluster Admin) The admin team consists of the people responsible for administrating the computers that the project relies on for its distributed work and communication to be synchronised. It consists mainly of those people who have physical access to the servers. Hat held by: the Admin team admin@FreeBSD.org, currently headed by Mark Murray markm@FreeBSD.org
Process dependent hats
Report originator The person originally responsible for filing a Problem Report.
Bugbuster A person who will either find the right person to solve the problem, or close the PR if it is a duplicate or otherwise not an interesting one.
Mentor A mentor is a committer who takes it upon him/her to introduce a new committer to the project, both in terms of ensuring the new committers setup is valid, that the new committer knows the available tools required in his/her work and that the new committer knows what is expected of him/her in terms of behaviour.
Vendor The person(s) or organisation whom external code comes from and whom patches are sent to.
Reviewers People on the mailing list where the request for review is posted.
CVSup Mirror Site Admin A CVSup Mirror Site Admin has accesses to a server that he/she uses to mirror the CVS repository. The admin works with the to ensure the site remains up-to-date and is following the general policy of official mirror sites.
Processes The following section will describe the defined project processes. Issues that are not handled by these processes happen on an ad-hoc basis based on what has been customary to do in similar cases.
Adding new and removing old committers The Core team has the responsibility of giving and removing commit privileges to contributors. This can only be done through a vote on the core mailing list. The ports and documentation sub-projects can give commit privileges to people working on these projects, but have to date not removed such privileges. Normally a contributor is recommended to core by a committer. For contributors or outsiders to contact core asking to be a committer is not well thought of and is usually rejected. If the area of particular interest for the developer potentially overlaps with other committers' area of maintainership, the opinion of those maintainers is sought. However, it is frequently this committer that recommends the developer. When a contributor is given committer status, he is assigned a mentor. The committer who recommended the new committer will, in the general case, take it upon himself to be the new committers mentor. When a contributor is given his commit bit, a -signed email is sent from either , or nik@freebsd.org to both admins@freebsd.org, the assigned mentor, the new committer and core confirming the approval of a new account. The mentor then gathers a password line, public key and PGP key from the new committer and sends them to . When the new account is created, the mentor activates the commit bit and guides the new committer through the rest of the initial process.
Process summary: adding a new committer
When a contributor sends a piece of code, the receiving committer may choose to recommend that the contributor is given commit privileges. If he recommends this to core, they will vote on this recommendation. If they vote in favour, a mentor is assigned the new committer and the new committer has to email his details to the administrators for an account to be created. After this, the new committer is all set to make his first commit. By tradition, this is by adding his name to the committers list. Recall that a committer is considered to be someone who has committed code during the past 12 months. However, it is not until after 18 months of inactivity have passed that commit privileges are eligible to be revoked. There are, however, no automatic procedures for doing this. For reactions concerning commit privileges not triggered by time, see section 1.5.8.
Process summary: removing a committer
When Core decides to clean up the committers list, they check who has not made a commit for the past 18 months. Committers who have not done so have their commit bits revoked. It is also possible for committers to request that their commit bit be retired if for some reason they are no longer going to be actively committing to the project. In this case, it can also be restored at a later time by core, should the committer ask. Roles in this process:
Adding/Removing an official CVSup Mirror A mirror is a replica of the official CVSup master that contains all the up-to-date source code for all the branches in the FreeBSD project, ports and documentation. Adding an official CVSup mirror starts with the potential installing the cvsup-mirror package. Having done this and updated the source code with a mirror site, he now runs a fairly recent unofficial CVSup mirror. Deciding he has a stable environment, the processing power, the network capacity and the storage capacity to run an official mirror, he mails the who decides whether the mirror should become an official mirror or not. In making this decision, the has to determine whether that geographical area needs another mirror site, if the mirror administrator has the skills to run it reliably, if the network bandwidth is adequate and if the master server has the capacity to server another mirror. If decides that the mirror should become an official mirror, he obtains an authentication key from the mirror admin that he installs so the mirror admin can update the mirror from the master server.
Process summary: adding a CVSup mirror
When a CVSup mirror administrator of an unofficial mirror offers to become an official mirror site, the CVSup coordinator decides if another mirror is needed and if there is sufficient capacity to accommodate it. If so, an authorisation key is requested and the mirror is given access to the main distribution site and added to the list of official mirrors. Tools used in this process: Hats involved in this process:
Committing code The committing of new or modified code is one of the most frequent processes in the FreeBSD project and will usually happen many times a day. Committing of code can only be done by a committer. Committers commit either code written by themselves, code submitted to them or code submitted through a problem report. When code is written by the developer that is non-trivial, he should seek a code review from the community. This is done by sending mail to the relevant list asking for review. Before submitting the code for review, he should ensure it compiles correctly with the entire tree and that all relevant tests run. This is called pre-commit test. When contributed code is received, it should be reviewed by the committer and tested the same way. When a change is committed to a part of the source that has been contributed from an outside , the maintainer should ensure that the patch is contributed back to the vendor. This is in line with the open source philosophy and makes it easier to stay in sync with outside projects as the patches do not have to be reapplied every time a new release is made. After the code has been available for review and no further changes are necessary, the code is committed into the development branch, -CURRENT. If the change applies for the -STABLE branch or the other branches as well, a Merge From Current ("MFC") countdown is set by the committer. After the number of days the committer chose when setting the MFC have passed, an email will automatically be sent to the committer reminding him to commit it to the -STABLE branch (and possibly security branches as well). Only security critical changes should be merged to security branches. Delaying the commit to -STABLE and other branches allows for parallel debugging where the committed code is tested on a wide range of configurations. This makes changes to -STABLE to contain fewer faults and thus giving the branch its name.
Process summary: A committer commits code
When a committer has written a piece of code and wants to commit it, he first needs to determine if it is trivial enough to go in without prior review or if it should first be reviewed by the developer community. If the code is trivial or has been reviewed and the committer is not the maintainer, he should consult the maintainer before proceeding. If the code is contributed by an outside vendor, the maintainer should create a patch that is sent back to the vendor. The code is then committed and the deployed by the users. Should they find problems with the code, this will be reported and the committer can go back to writing a patch. If a vendor is affected, he can choose to implement or ignore the patch.
Process summary: A contributor commits code
The difference when a contributor makes a code contribution is that he submits the code through the send-pr program. This report is picked up by the maintainer who reviews the code and commits it. Hats included in this process are:
Core election Core elections are held at least every two years. The first Core election was held September 2000 Nine core members are elected. New elections are held if the number of core members drops below seven. New elections can also be held should at least 1/3 of the active committers demand this. When an election is to take place, core announces this at least 6 weeks in advance, and appoints an election manager to run the elections. Only committers can be elected into core. The candidates need to submit their candidacy at least one week before the election starts, but can refine their statements until the voting starts. They are presented in the candidates list. When writing their election statements, the candidates must answer a few standard questions submitted by the election manager. During elections, the rule that a committer must have committed during the 12 past months is followed strictly. Only these committers are eligible to vote. When voting, the committer may vote once in support of up to nine nominees. The voting is done over a period of four weeks with reminders being posted on developers mailing list that is available to all committers. The election results are released one week after the election ends, and the new core team takes office one week after the results have been posted. Should there be a voting tie, this will be resolved by the new, unambiguously elected core members. Votes and candidate statements are archived, but the archives are not publicly available.
Process summary: Core elections
Core announces the election and selects an election manager. He prepares the elections, and when ready, candidates can announce their candidacies through submitting their statements. The committers then vote. After the vote is over, the election results are announced and the new core team takes office. Hats in core elections are:
Development of new features Within the project there are sub-projects that are working on new features. These projects are generally done by one person . Every project is free to organise development as it sees fit. However, when the project is merged to the -CURRENT branch it must follow the project guidelines. When the code has been well tested in the -CURRENT branch and deemed stable enough and relevant to the -STABLE branch, it is merged to the -STABLE branch. The requirements of the project are given by developer wishes, requests from the community in terms of direct requests by mail, Problem Reports, commercial funding for the development of features, or contributions by the scientific community. The wishes that come within the responsibility of a developer are given to that developer who prioritises his time between the request and his wishes. A common way to do this is maintain a TODO-list maintained by the project. Items that do not come within someone's responsibility are collected on TODO-lists unless someone volunteers to take the responsibility. All requests, their distribution and follow-up are handled by the tool. Requirements analysis happens in two ways. The requests that come in are discussed on mailing lists, both within the main project and in the sub-project that the request belongs to or is spawned by the request. Furthermore, individual developers on the sub-project will evaluate the feasibility of the requests and determine the prioritisation between them. Other than archives of the discussions that have taken place, no outcome is created by this phase that is merged into the main project. As the requests are prioritised by the individual developers on the basis of doing what they find interesting, necessary or are funded to do, there is no overall strategy or priorisation of what requests to regard as requirements and following up their correct implementation. However, most developers have some shared vision of what issues are more important, and they can ask for guidelines from the release engineering team. The verification phase of the project is two-fold. Before committing code to the current-branch, developers request their code to be reviewed by their peers. This review is for the most part done by functional testing, but also code review is important. When the code is committed to the branch, a broader functional testing will happen, that may trigger further code review and debugging should the code not behave as expected. This second verification form may be regarded as structural verification. Although the sub-projects themselves may write formal tests such as unit tests, these are usually not collected by the main project and are usually removed before the code is committed to the current branch. More and more tests are however performed when building the system (make world). These tests are however a very new addition and no systematic framework for these tests have yet been created.
Maintenance It is an advantage to the project to for each area of the source have at least one person that knows this area well. Some parts of the code have designated maintainers. Others have de-facto maintainers, and some parts of the system do not have maintainers. The maintainer is usually a person from the sub-project that wrote and integrated the code, or someone who has ported it from the platform it was written for. sendmail and named are examples of code that has been merged from other platforms. The maintainer's job is to make sure the code is in sync with the project the code comes from if it is contributed code, and apply patches submitted by the community or write fixes to issues that are discovered. The main bulk of work that is put into the FreeBSD project is maintenance. has made a figure showing the life cycle of changes.
Jørgenssen's model for change integration
Here development release refers to the -CURRENT branch while production release refers to the -STABLE branch. The pre-commit test is the functional testing by peer developers when asked to do so or trying out the code to determine the status of the sub-project. Parallel debugging is the functional testing that can trigger more review, and debugging when the code is included in the -CURRENT branch. As of this writing, there were 269 committers in the project. When they commit a change to a branch, that constitutes a new release. It is very common for users in the community to track a particular branch. The immediate existence of a new release makes the changes widely available right away and allows for rapid feedback from the community. This also gives the community the response time they expect on issues that are of importance to them. This makes the community more engaged, and thus allows for more and better feedback that again spurs more maintenance and ultimately should create a better product. Before making changes to code in parts of the tree that has a history unknown to the committer, the committer is required to read the commit logs to see why certain features are implemented the way they are in order not to make mistakes that have previously either been thought through or resolved.
Problem reporting FreeBSD comes with a problem reporting tool called send-pr that is a part of the GNATS package. All users and developers are encouraged to use this tool for reporting problems in software they do not maintain. Problems include bug reports, feature requests, features that should be enhanced and notices of new versions of external software that is included in the project. Problem reports are sent to an email address where it is inserted into the GNATS maintenance database. A classifies the problem and sends it to the correct group or maintainer within the project. After someone has taken responsibility for the report, the report is being analysed. This analysis includes verifying the problem and thinking out a solution for the problem. Often feedback is required from the report originator or even from the FreeBSD community. Once a patch for the problem is made, the originator may be asked to try it out. Finally, the working patch is integrated into the project, and documented if applicable. It there goes through the regular maintenance cycle as described in section . These are the states a problem report can be in: open, analyzed, feedback, patched, suspended and closed. The suspended state is for when further progress is not possible due to the lack of information or for when the task would require so much work that nobody is working on it at the moment.
Process summary: problem reporting
A problem is reported by the report originator. It is then classified by a bugbuster and handed to the correct maintainer. He verifies the problem and discusses the problem with the originator until he has enough information to create a working patch. This patch is then committed and the problem report is closed. The roles included in this process are: .
Reacting to misbehaviour has a number of rules that committers should follow. However, it happens that these rules are broken. The following rules exist in order to be able to react to misbehaviour. They specify what actions will result in how long a suspension the committer's commit privileges. Committing during code freezes without the approval of the Release Engineering team - 2 days Committing to a security branch without approval - 2 days Commit wars - 5 days to all participating parties Impolite or inappropriate behaviour - 5 days For the suspensions to be efficient, any single core member can implement a suspension before discussing it on the core mailing list. Repeat offenders can, with a 2/3 vote by core, receive harsher penalties, including permanent removal of commit privileges. (However, the latter is always viewed as a last resort, due to its inherent tendency to create controversy). All suspensions are posted to the developers mailing list, a list available to committers only. It is important that you cannot be suspended for making technical errors. All penalties come from breaking social etiquette. Hats involved in this process:
Release engineering The FreeBSD project has a Release Engineering team with a principal release engineer that is responsible for creating releases of FreeBSD that can be brought out to the user community via the net or sold in retail outlets. Since FreeBSD is available on multiple platforms and releases for the different architectures are made available at the same time, the team has one person in charge of each architecture. Also, there are roles in the team responsible for coordinating quality assurance efforts, building a package set and for having an updated set of documents. When referring to the release engineer, a representative for the release engineering team is meant. When a release is coming, the FreeBSD project changes shape somewhat. A release schedule is made containing feature- and code-freezes, release of interim releases and the final release. A feature-freeze means no new features are allowed to be committed to the branch without the release engineers' explicit consent. Code-freeze means no changes to the code (like bugs-fixes) are allowed to be committed without the release engineers explicit consent. This feature- and code-freeze is known as stabilising. During the release process, the release engineer has the full authority to revert to older versions of code and thus "back out" changes should he find that the changes are not suitable to be included in the release. There are three different kinds of releases: .0 releases are the first release of a major version. These are branched of the -CURRENT branch and have a significantly longer release engineering cycle due to the unstable nature of the -CURRENT branch .X releases are releases of the -STABLE branch. They are scheduled to come out every 4 months. .X.Y releases are security releases that follow the .X branch. These come out only when sufficient security fixes have been merged since the last release on that branch. New features are rarely included, and the security team is far more involved in these than in regular releases. For releases of the -STABLE-branch, the release process starts 45 days before the anticipated release date. During the first phase, the first 15 days, the developers merge what changes they have had in -CURRENT that they want to have in the release to the release branch. When this period is over, the code enters a 15 day code freeze in which only bug fixes, documentation updates, security-related fixes and minor device driver changes are allowed. These changes must be approved by the release engineer in advance. At the beginning of the last 15 day period a release candidate is created for widespread testing. Updates are less likely to be allowed during this period, except for important bug fixes and security updates. In this final period, all releases are considered release candidates. At the end of the release process, a release is created with the new version number, including binary distributions on web sites and the creation of a CD-ROM images. However, the release is not considered "really released" until a -signed message stating exactly that, is sent to the mailing list freebsd-announce; anything labelled as a "release" before that may well be in-process and subject to change before the PGP-signed message is sent. Many commercial vendors use these images to create CD-ROMs that are sold in retail outlets. . The releases of the -CURRENT-branch (that is, all releases that end with .0) are very similar, but with twice as long timeframe. It starts 8 weeks prior to the release with announcement of the release time line. Two weeks into the release process, the feature freeze is initiated and performance tweaks should be kept to a minimum. Four weeks prior to the release, an official beta version is made available. Two weeks prior to release, the code is officially branched into a new version. This version is given release candidate status, and as with the release engineering of -STABLE, the code freeze of the release candidate is hardened. However, development on the main development branch can continue. Other than these differences, the release engineering processes are alike. .0 releases go into their own branch and are aimed mainly at early adopters. The branch then goes through a period of stabilisation, and it is not until the decides the demands to stability have been satisfied that the branch becomes -STABLE and -CURRENT targets the next major version. While this for the majority has been with .1 versions, this is not a demand. Most releases are made when a given date that has been deemed a long enough time since the previous release comes. A target is set for having major releases every 18 months and minor releases every 4 months. The user community has made it very clear that security and stability cannot be sacrificed by self-imposed deadlines and target release dates. For slips of time not to become too long with regards to security and stability issues, extra discipline is required when committing changes to -STABLE.
Process summary: release engineering
These are the stages in the release engineering process. Multiple release candidates may be created until the release is deemed stable enough to be released.
Tools The major support tools for supporting the development process are CVS, CVSup, Perforce, GNATS, Mailman and OpenSSH. Except for CVSup, these are externally developed tools. These tools are commonly used in the open source world.
Concurrent Versions System (CVS) Concurrent Versions System or simply CVS is a system to handle multiple versions of text files and tracking who committed what changes and why. A project lives within a repository and different versions are considered different branches.
CVSup CVSup is a software package for distributing and updating collections of files across a network. It consists of a client program, cvsup, and a server program, cvsupd. The package is tailored specifically for distributing CVS repositories, and by taking advantage of CVS' properties, it performs updates much faster than traditional systems.
GNATS GNATS is a maintenance database consisting of a set of tools to track bugs at a central site. It supports the bug tracking process for sending and handling bugs as well as querying and updating the database and editing bug reports. The project uses one of its many client interfaces, send-pr, to send Problem Reports by email to the projects central GNATS server. The committers have also web and command-line clients available.
Mailman Mailman is a program that automates the management of mailing lists. The FreeBSD Project uses it to run 16 general lists, 60 technical lists, 4 limited lists and 5 lists with CVS commit logs. It is also used for many mailing lists set up and used by other people and projects in the FreeBSD community. General lists are lists for the general public, technical lists are mainly for the development of specific areas of interest, and closed lists are for internal communication not intended for the general public. The majority of all the communication in the project goes through these 85 lists , Appendix C.
Perforce Perforce is a commercial software configuration management system developed by Perforce Systems that is available on over 50 operating systems. It is a collection of clients built around the Perforce server that contains the central file repository and tracks the operations done upon it. The clients are both clients for accessing the repository and administration of its configuration.
Pretty Good Privacy Pretty Good Privacy, better known as PGP, is a cryptosystem using a public key architecture to allow people to digitally sign and/or encrypt information in order to ensure secure communication between two parties. A signature is used when sending information out many recipients, enabling them to verify that the information has not been tampered with before they received it. In the FreeBSD Project this is the primary means of ensuring that information has been written by the person who claims to have written it, and not altered in transit.
Secure Shell Secure Shell is a standard for securely logging into a remote system and for executing commands on the remote system. It allows other connections, called tunnels, to be established and protected between the two involved systems. This standard exists in two primary versions, and only version two is used for the FreeBSD Project. The most common implementation of the standard is OpenSSH that is a part of the project's main distribution. Since its source is updated more often than FreeBSD releases, the latest version is also available in the ports tree.
Sub-projects Sub-projects are formed to reduce the amount of communication needed to coordinate the group of developers. When a problem area is sufficiently isolated, most communication would be within the group focusing on the problem, requiring less communication with the groups they communicate with than were the group not isolated.
The Ports Subproject A port is a set of meta-data and patches that are needed to fetch, compile and install correctly an external piece of software on a FreeBSD system. The amount of ports have grown at a tremendous rate, as shown by the following figure.
Number of ports added between 1996 and 2005
is taken from the FreeBSD web site. It shows the number of ports available to FreeBSD in the period 1995 to 2005. It looks like the curve has first grown exponentionally, and then - since the middle of 2001 grown linerly. + since the middle of 2001 grown linearly. As the external software described by the port often is under continued development, the amount of work required to maintain the ports is already large, and increasing. This has led to the ports part of the FreeBSD project gaining a more empowered structure, and is more and more becoming a sub-project of the FreeBSD project. Ports has its own core team with the as its leader, and this team can appoint committers without FreeBSD Core's approval. Unlike in the FreeBSD Project, where a lot of maintenance frequently is rewarded with a commit bit, the ports sub-project contains many active maintainers that are not committers. Unlike the main project, the ports tree is not branched. Every release of FreeBSD follows the current ports collection and has thus available updated information on where to find programs and how to build them. This, however, means that a port that makes dependencies on the system may need to have variations depending on what version of FreeBSD it runs on. With an unbranched ports repository it is not possible to guarantee that any port will run on anything other than -CURRENT and -STABLE, in particular older, minor releases. There is neither the infrastructure nor volunteer time needed to guarantee this. For efficiency of communication, teams depending on Ports, such as the release engineering team, have their own ports liaisons.
The FreeBSD Documentation Project The FreeBSD Documentation project was started January 1995. From the initial group of a project leader, four team leaders and 16 members, they are now a total of 44 committers. The documentation mailing list has just under 300 members, indicating that there is quite a large community around it. The goal of the Documentation project is to provide good and useful documentation of the FreeBSD project, thus making it easier for new users to get familiar with the system and detailing advanced features for the users. The main tasks in the Documentation project are to work on current projects in the FreeBSD Documentation Set, and translate the documentation to other languages. Like the FreeBSD Project, documentation is split in the same branches. This is done so that there is always an updated version of the documentation for each version. Only documentation errors are corrected in the security branches. Like the ports sub-project, the Documentation project can appoint documentation committers without FreeBSD Core's approval. . The Documentation project has a primer. This is used both to introduce new project members to the standard tools and syntaxes and acts as a reference when working on the project.
References Frederick P.Brooks 19751995 Pearson Education Limited 0201835959 Addison-Wesley Pub Co The Mythical Man-Month Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition) NiklasSaers 2003 A project model for the FreeBSD Project Candidatus Scientiarum thesis NielsJørgensen 2001 Putting it All in the Trunk Incremental Software Development in the FreeBSD Open Source Project Project Management Institute 19962000 Project Management Institute 1-880410-23-0 Project Management Institute
Newtown Square Pennsylvania USA
PMBOK Guide A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, 2000 Edition 2002 The FreeBSD Project Core Bylaws 2002 The FreeBSD Documentation Project FreeBSD Developer's Handbook 2002 The FreeBSD Project Core team election 2002 WarnerLosh 2002 The FreeBSD Documentation Project Working with Hats Dag-ErlingSmørgrav HitenPandya 2002 The FreeBSD Documentation Project The FreeBSD Documentation Project Problem Report Handling Guidelines Dag-ErlingSmørgrav 2002 The FreeBSD Documentation Project The FreeBSD Documentation Project Writing FreeBSD Problem Reports 2001 The FreeBSD Documentation Project The FreeBSD Documentation Project Committers Guide MurrayStokely 2002 The FreeBSD Documentation Project The FreeBSD Documentation Project FreeBSD Release Engineering The FreeBSD Documentation Project FreeBSD Handbook 2002 The FreeBSD Documentation Project The FreeBSD Documentation Project Contributors to FreeBSD 2002 The FreeBSD Project The FreeBSD Project Core team elections 2002 2002 The FreeBSD Project The FreeBSD Project Commit Bit Expiration Policy 2002/04/06 15:35:30 2002 The FreeBSD Project The FreeBSD Project New Account Creation Procedure 2002/08/19 17:11:27 2002 The FreeBSD Documentation Project The FreeBSD Documentation Project FreeBSD DocEng Team Charter 2003/03/16 12:17 GregLehey 2002 Greg Lehey Greg Lehey Two years in the trenches The evolution of a software project diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/developers-handbook/l10n/chapter.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/developers-handbook/l10n/chapter.sgml index c849284e27..321eff5125 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/developers-handbook/l10n/chapter.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/developers-handbook/l10n/chapter.sgml @@ -1,326 +1,326 @@ Localization and Internationalization - L10N and I18N Programming I18N Compliant Applications Qt GTK To make your application more useful for speakers of other languages, we hope that you will program I18N compliant. The GNU gcc compiler and GUI libraries like QT and GTK support I18N through special handling of strings. Making a program I18N compliant is very easy. It allows contributors to port your application to other languages quickly. Refer to the library specific I18N documentation for more details. In contrast with common perception, I18N compliant code is easy to write. Usually, it only involves wrapping your strings with library specific functions. In addition, please be sure to allow for wide or multibyte character support. A Call to Unify the I18N Effort It has come to our attention that the individual I18N/L10N efforts for each country has been repeating each others' efforts. Many of us have been reinventing the wheel repeatedly and inefficiently. We hope that the various major groups in I18N could congregate into a group effort similar to the Core Team's responsibility. Currently, we hope that, when you write or port I18N programs, you would send it out to each country's related FreeBSD mailing list for testing. In the future, we hope to create applications that work in all the languages out-of-the-box without dirty hacks. The &a.i18n; has been established. If you are an I18N/L10N developer, please send your comments, ideas, questions, and anything you deem related to it. Perl and Python Perl Python Perl and Python have I18N and wide character handling libraries. Please use them for I18N compliance. Gábor Kövesdán Contributed by Localized Messages with POSIX.1 Native Language Support (NLS) Beyond the basic I18N functions, like supporting various input encodings or supporting national conventions, such as the different decimal separators, at a higher level of I18N, it is possible to localize the messages written to the output by the various programs. A common way of doing this is using the POSIX.1 NLS functions, which are provided as a part of the &os; base system. Organizing Localized Messages into Catalog Files POSIX.1 NLS is based on catalog files, which contain the localized messages in the desired encoding. The messages are organized into sets and each message is identified by an integer number in the containing set. The catalog files are conventionally named after the locale they contain localized messages for, followed by the .msg extension. For instance, the Hungarian messages for ISO8859-2 encoding should be stored in a file called hu_HU.ISO8859-2. These catalog files are common text files that contain the numbered messages. It is possible to write comments by starting the line with a $ sign. Set boundaries are also separated by special comments, where the keyword set must directly follow the $ sign. The set keyword is then followed by the set number. For example: $set 1 The actual message entries start with the message number and followed by the localized message. The well-known modifiers from &man.printf.3; are accepted: 15 "File not found: %s\n" The language catalog files have to be compiled into a binary form before they can be opened from the program. This conversion is done with the &man.gencat.1; utility. Its first argument is the filename of the compiled catalog and its further arguments are the input catalogs. The localized messages can also be organized into more catalog files and then all of them can be processed with &man.gencat.1;. Using the Catalog Files from the Source Code Using the catalog files is simple. To use the related functions, nl_types.h must be included. Before using a catalog, it has to be opened with &man.catopen.3;. The function takes two arguments. The first parameter is the name of the installed and compiled catalog. Usually, the name of the program is used, such as grep. This name will be used when looking for the compiled catalog file. The &man.catopen.3; call looks for this file in /usr/share/nls/locale/catname and in /usr/local/share/nls/locale/catname, where locale is the locale set and catname is the catalog name being discussed. The second parameter is a constant, which can have two values: NL_CAT_LOCALE, which means that the used catalog file will be based on LC_MESSAGES. 0, which means that LANG has to be used to open the proper catalog. The &man.catopen.3; call returns a catalog identifier of type nl_catd. Please refer to the manual page for a list of possible returned error codes. After opening a catalog &man.catgets.3; can be used to retrieve a message. The first parameter is the catalog identifier returned by &man.catopen.3;, the second one is the number of the set, the third one is the number of the messages, and the fourth one is a fallback message, which will be returned if the requested message cannot be retrieved from the catalog file. After using the catalog file, it must be closed by calling &man.catclose.3;, which has one argument, the catalog id. A Practical Example The following example will demonstrate an easy solution on how to use NLS catalogs in a flexible way. The below lines need to be put into a common header file of the program, which is included into all source files where localized messages are necessary: #ifdef WITHOUT_NLS #define getstr(n) nlsstr[n] #else #include <nl_types.h> extern nl_catd catalog; #define getstr(n) catgets(catalog, 1, n, nlsstr[n]) #endif extern char *nlsstr[]; Next, put these lines into the global declaration part of the main source file: #ifndef WITHOUT_NLS #include <nl_types.h> nl_catd catalog; #endif /* * Default messages to use when NLS is disabled or no catalog * is found. */ char *nlsstr[] = { "", /* 1*/ "some random message", /* 2*/ "some other message" }; Next come the real code snippets, which open, read, and close the catalog: #ifndef WITHOUT_NLS catalog = catopen("myapp", NL_CAT_LOCALE); #endif ... printf(getstr(1)); ... #ifndef WITHOUT_NLS catclose(catalog); #endif Reducing Strings to Localize There is a good way of reducing the strings that need to be localized by using libc error messages. This is also useful to just avoid duplication and provide consistent error messages for the common errors that can be encountered by a great many of programs. First, here is an example that does not use libc error messages: #include <err.h> ... if (!S_ISDIR(st.st_mode)) err(1, "argument is not a directory"); This can be transformed to print an error message by reading errno and printing an error message accordingly: #include <err.h> #include <errno.h> ... if (!S_ISDIR(st.st_mode)) { errno = ENOTDIR; err(1, NULL); } In this example, the custom string is eliminated, thus translators will have less work when localizing the program and users will see the usual Not a directory error message when they encounter this error. This message will probably seem more familiar to them. Please note that it was necessary to include errno.h in order to directly access errno. It is worth to note that there are cases when errno is set automatically by a preceding call, so it is not necessary to set it explicitly: #include <err.h> ... if ((p = malloc(size)) == NULL) err(1, NULL); Making use of <filename>bsd.nls.mk</filename> Using the catalog files requires few repeatable steps, such as compiling the catalogs and installing them to the proper location. In order to simplify this process even more, bsd.nls.mk introduces some macros. It is not necessary to include bsd.nls.mk explicitly, it is pulled in from the common Makefiles, such as bsd.prog.mk or bsd.lib.mk. Usually it is enough to define NLSNAME, which should have the catalog name mentioned as the first argument of &man.catopen.3; and list the catalog files in NLS without their .msg extension. Here is an example, which makes it possible to to disable NLS when used with the code examples before. The WITHOUT_NLS &man.make.1; variable has to be defined in order to build the program without NLS support. .if !defined(WITHOUT_NLS) NLS= es_ES.ISO8859-1 NLS+= hu_HU.ISO8859-2 NLS+= pt_BR.ISO8859-1 .else CFLAGS+= -DWITHOUT_NLS .endif Conventionally, the catalog files are placed under the nls subdirectory and this is the default behaviour of bsd.nls.mk. It is possible, though to override the location of the catalogs with the NLSSRCDIR &man.make.1; variable. The default name of the precompiled catalog files also follow the naming convention mentioned before. It can be - overriden by setting the NLSNAME variable. + overridden by setting the NLSNAME variable. There are other options to fine tune the processing of the catalog files but usually it is not needed, thus they are not described here. For further information on bsd.nls.mk, please refer to the file itself, it is short and easy to understand. diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/fdp-primer/sgml-markup/chapter.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/fdp-primer/sgml-markup/chapter.sgml index dfce70081f..060d67e819 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/fdp-primer/sgml-markup/chapter.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/fdp-primer/sgml-markup/chapter.sgml @@ -1,2703 +1,2703 @@ SGML Markup This chapter describes the two markup languages you will encounter when you contribute to the FreeBSD documentation project. Each section describes the markup language, and details the markup that you are likely to want to use, or that is already in use. These markup languages contain a large number of elements, and it can be confusing sometimes to know which element to use for a particular situation. This section goes through the elements you are most likely to need, and gives examples of how you would use them. This is not an exhaustive list of elements, since that would just reiterate the documentation for each language. The aim of this section is to list those elements more likely to be useful to you. If you have a question about how best to markup a particular piece of content, please post it to the &a.doc;. Inline vs. Block In the remainder of this document, when describing elements, inline means that the element can occur within a block element, and does not cause a line break. A block element, by comparison, will cause a line break (and other processing) when it is encountered. HTML HTML, the HyperText Markup Language, is the markup language of choice on the World Wide Web. More information can be found at . HTML is used to markup pages on the FreeBSD web site. It should not (generally) be used to mark up other documentation, since DocBook offers a far richer set of elements to choose from. Consequently, you will normally only encounter HTML pages if you are writing for the web site. HTML has gone through a number of versions, 1, 2, 3.0, 3.2, and the latest, 4.0 (available in both strict and loose variants). The HTML DTDs are available from the Ports Collection in the textproc/html port. They are automatically installed as part of the textproc/docproj port. Formal Public Identifier (FPI) There are a number of HTML FPIs, depending upon the version (also known as the level) of HTML that you want to declare your document to be compliant with. The majority of HTML documents on the FreeBSD web site comply with the loose version of HTML 4.0. PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" Sectional Elements An HTML document is normally split into two sections. The first section, called the head, contains meta-information about the document, such as its title, the name of the author, the parent document, and so on. The second section, the body, contains the content that will be displayed to the user. These sections are indicated with head and body elements respectively. These elements are contained within the top-level html element. Normal HTML Document Structure <html> <head> <title>The Document's Title</title> </head> <body> … </body> </html> Block Elements Headings HTML allows you to denote headings in your document, at up to six different levels. The largest and most prominent heading is h1, then h2, continuing down to h6. The element's content is the text of the heading. <sgmltag>h1</sgmltag>, <sgmltag>h2</sgmltag>, etc. Use: First section

This is the heading for the first section

This is the heading for the first sub-section

This is the heading for the second section

]]> Generally, an HTML page should have one first level heading (h1). This can contain many second level headings (h2), which can in turn contain many third level headings. Each hn element should have the same element, but one further up the hierarchy, preceding it. Leaving gaps in the numbering is to be avoided. Bad Ordering of <sgmltag>h<replaceable>n</replaceable></sgmltag> Elements Use: First section

Sub-section

]]> Paragraphs HTML supports a single paragraph element, p. <sgmltag>p</sgmltag> Use: This is a paragraph. It can contain just about any other element.

]]> Block Quotations A block quotation is an extended quotation from another document that should not appear within the current paragraph. <sgmltag>blockquote</sgmltag> Use: A small excerpt from the US Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
]]> Lists You can present the user with three types of lists, ordered, unordered, and definition. Typically, each entry in an ordered list will be numbered, while each entry in an unordered list will be preceded by a bullet point. Definition lists are composed of two sections for each entry. The first section is the term being defined, and the second section is the definition of the term. Ordered lists are indicated by the ol element, unordered lists by the ul element, and definition lists by the dl element. Ordered and unordered lists contain listitems, indicated by the li element. A listitem can contain textual content, or it may be further wrapped in one or more p elements. Definition lists contain definition terms (dt) and definition descriptions (dd). A definition term can only contain inline elements. A definition description can contain other block elements. <sgmltag>ul</sgmltag> and <sgmltag>ol</sgmltag> Use: An unordered list. Listitems will probably be preceded by bullets.

  • First item
  • Second item
  • Third item

An ordered list, with list items consisting of multiple paragraphs. Each item (note: not each paragraph) will be numbered.

  1. This is the first item. It only has one paragraph.

  2. This is the first paragraph of the second item.

    This is the second paragraph of the second item.

  3. This is the first and only paragraph of the third item.

]]> Definition Lists with <sgmltag>dl</sgmltag> Use:
Term 1

Paragraph 1 of definition 1.

Paragraph 2 of definition 1.

Term 2

Paragraph 1 of definition 2.

Term 3

Paragraph 1 of definition 3.

]]> Pre-formatted Text You can indicate that text should be shown to the user exactly as it is in the file. Typically, this means that the text is shown in a fixed font, multiple spaces are not merged into one, and line breaks in the text are significant. In order to do this, wrap the content in the pre element. <sgmltag>pre</sgmltag> You could use pre to mark up an email message: From: nik@FreeBSD.org To: freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org Subject: New documentation available There is a new copy of my primer for contributors to the FreeBSD Documentation Project available at <URL:http://people.FreeBSD.org/~nik/primer/index.html> Comments appreciated. N]]> Keep in mind that < and & still are recognized as special characters in pre-formatted text. This is why the example shown had to use &lt; instead of <. For consistency, &gt; was used in place of >, too. Watch out for the special characters that may appear in text copied from a plain-text source, e.g., an email message or program code. Tables Most text-mode browsers (such as Lynx) do not render tables particularly effectively. If you are relying on the tabular display of your content, you should consider using alternative markup to prevent confusion. Mark up tabular information using the table element. A table consists of one or more table rows (tr), each containing one or more cells of table data (td). Each cell can contain other block elements, such as paragraphs or lists. It can also contain another table (this nesting can repeat indefinitely). If the cell only contains one paragraph then you do not need to include the p element. Simple Use of <sgmltag>table</sgmltag> Use: This is a simple 2x2 table.

Top left cell Top right cell
Bottom left cell Bottom right cell
]]> A cell can span multiple rows and columns. To indicate this, add the rowspan and/or colspan attributes, with values indicating the number of rows or columns that should be spanned. Using <literal>rowspan</literal> Use: One tall thin cell on the left, two short cells next to it on the right.

Long and thin
Top cell Bottom cell
]]> Using <literal>colspan</literal> Use: One long cell on top, two short cells below it.

Top cell
Bottom left cell Bottom right cell
]]> Using <literal>rowspan</literal> and <literal>colspan</literal> together Use: On a 3x3 grid, the top left block is a 2x2 set of cells merged into one. The other cells are normal.

Top left large cell Top right cell
Middle right cell
Bottom left cell Bottom middle cell Bottom right cell
]]> In-line Elements Emphasizing Information You have two levels of emphasis available in HTML, em and strong. em is for a normal level of emphasis and strong indicates stronger emphasis. Typically, em is rendered in italic and strong is rendered in bold. This is not always the case, however, and you should not rely on it. <sgmltag>em</sgmltag> and <sgmltag>strong</sgmltag> Use: This has been emphasized, while this has been strongly emphasized.

]]> Bold and Italics Because HTML includes presentational markup, you can also indicate that particular content should be rendered in bold or italic. The elements are b and i respectively. <sgmltag>b</sgmltag> and <sgmltag>i</sgmltag> This is in bold, while this is in italics.

]]> Indicating Fixed-Pitch Text If you have content that should be rendered in a fixed pitch (typewriter) typeface, use tt (for teletype). <sgmltag>tt</sgmltag> Use: This document was originally written by Nik Clayton, who can be reached by email as nik@FreeBSD.org.

]]> Content Size You can indicate that content should be shown in a larger or smaller font. There are three ways of doing this. Use big and small around the content you wish to change size. These tags can be nested, so <big><big>This is much bigger</big></big> is possible. Use font with the size attribute set to +1 or -1 respectively. This has the same effect as using big or small. However, the use of this approach is deprecated. Use font with the size attribute set to a number between 1 and 7. The default font size is 3. This approach is deprecated. <sgmltag>big</sgmltag>, <sgmltag>small</sgmltag>, and <sgmltag>font</sgmltag> The following fragments all do the same thing. This text is slightly smaller. But this text is slightly bigger.

This text is slightly smaller. But this text is slightly bigger.

This text is slightly smaller. But this text is slightly bigger.

]]> Links Links are also in-line elements. Linking to Other Documents on the WWW In order to include a link to another document on the WWW you must know the URL of the document you want to link to. The link is indicated with a, and the href attribute contains the URL of the target document. The content of the element becomes the link, and is normally indicated to the user in some way (underlining, change of color, different mouse cursor when over the link, and so on). Using <literal><a href="..."></literal> Use: More information is available at the FreeBSD web site.

]]> These links will take the user to the top of the chosen document. Linking to Other Parts of Documents Linking to a point within another document (or within the same document) requires that the document author include anchors that you can link to. Anchors are indicated with a and the name attribute instead of href. Using <literal><a name="..."></literal> Use: This paragraph can be referenced in other links with the name para1.

]]> To link to a named part of a document, write a normal link to that document, but include the name of the anchor after a # symbol. Linking to A Named Part of Another Document Assume that the para1 example resides in a document called foo.html. More information can be found in the first paragraph of foo.html.

]]> If you are linking to a named anchor within the same document then you can omit the document's URL, and just include the name of the anchor (with the preceding #). Linking to A Named Part of the Same Document Assume that the para1 example resides in this document: More information can be found in the first paragraph of this document.

]]> DocBook DocBook was originally developed by HaL Computer Systems and O'Reilly & Associates to be a DTD for writing technical documentation A short history can be found under http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/intro.shtml#d0e41. . Since 1998 it is maintained by the DocBook Technical Committee. As such, and unlike LinuxDoc and HTML, DocBook is very heavily oriented towards markup that describes what something is, rather than describing how it should be presented. Formal vs. Informal Some elements may exist in two forms, formal and informal. Typically, the formal version of the element will consist of a title followed by the informal version of the element. The informal version will not have a title. The DocBook DTD is available from the Ports Collection in the textproc/docbook port. It is automatically installed as part of the textproc/docproj port. &os; Extensions The FreeBSD Documentation Project has extended the DocBook DTD by adding some new elements. These elements serve to make some of the markup more precise. Where a FreeBSD specific element is listed below it is clearly marked. Throughout the rest of this document, the term DocBook is used to mean the FreeBSD extended DocBook DTD. There is nothing about these extensions that is FreeBSD specific, it was just felt that they were useful enhancements for this particular project. Should anyone from any of the other *nix camps (NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, …) be interested in collaborating on a standard DocBook extension set, please get in touch with &a.doceng;. The &os; extensions are not (currently) in the Ports Collection. They are stored in the &os; CVS tree, as doc/share/sgml/freebsd.dtd. Formal Public Identifier (FPI) In compliance with the DocBook guidelines for writing FPIs for DocBook customizations, the FPI for the FreeBSD extended DocBook DTD is: PUBLIC "-//FreeBSD//DTD DocBook V4.1-Based Extension//EN" Document Structure DocBook allows you to structure your documentation in several ways. In the FreeBSD Documentation Project we are using two primary types of DocBook document: the book and the article. A book is organized into chapters. This is a mandatory requirement. There may be parts between the book and the chapter to provide another layer of organization. For example, the Handbook is arranged in this way. A chapter may (or may not) contain one or more sections. These are indicated with the sect1 element. If a section contains another section then use the sect2 element, and so on, up to sect5. Chapters and sections contain the remainder of the content. An article is simpler than a book, and does not use chapters. Instead, the content of an article is organized into one or more sections, using the same sect1 (and sect2 and so on) elements that are used in books. Obviously, you should consider the nature of the documentation you are writing in order to decide whether it is best marked up as a book or an article. Articles are well suited to information that does not need to be broken down into several chapters, and that is, relatively speaking, quite short, at up to 20-25 pages of content. Books are best suited to information that can be broken up into several chapters, possibly with appendices and similar content as well. The FreeBSD tutorials are all marked up as articles, while this document, the FreeBSD FAQ, and the FreeBSD Handbook are all marked up as books, for example. Starting a Book The content of the book is contained within the book element. As well as containing structural markup, this element can contain elements that include additional information about the book. This is either meta-information, used for reference purposes, or additional content used to produce a title page. This additional information should be contained within bookinfo. Boilerplate <sgmltag>book</sgmltag> with <sgmltag>bookinfo</sgmltag> <book> <bookinfo> <title>Your Title Here</title> <author> <firstname>Your first name</firstname> <surname>Your surname</surname> <affiliation> <address><email>Your email address</email></address> </affiliation> </author> <copyright> <year>1998</year> <holder role="mailto:your email address">Your name</holder> </copyright> <releaseinfo>$FreeBSD$</releaseinfo> <abstract> <para>Include an abstract of the book's contents here.</para> </abstract> </bookinfo> … </book> Starting an Article The content of the article is contained within the article element. As well as containing structural markup, this element can contain elements that include additional information about the article. This is either meta-information, used for reference purposes, or additional content used to produce a title page. This additional information should be contained within articleinfo. Boilerplate <sgmltag>article</sgmltag> with <sgmltag>articleinfo</sgmltag> <article> <articleinfo> <title>Your title here</title> <author> <firstname>Your first name</firstname> <surname>Your surname</surname> <affiliation> <address><email>Your email address</email></address> </affiliation> </author> <copyright> <year>1998</year> <holder role="mailto:your email address">Your name</holder> </copyright> <releaseinfo>$FreeBSD$</releaseinfo> <abstract> <para>Include an abstract of the article's contents here.</para> </abstract> </articleinfo> … </article> Indicating Chapters Use chapter to mark up your chapters. Each chapter has a mandatory title. Articles do not contain chapters, they are reserved for books. A Simple Chapter The Chapter's Title ... ]]> A chapter cannot be empty; it must contain elements in addition to title. If you need to include an empty chapter then just use an empty paragraph. Empty Chapters This is An Empty Chapter ]]> Sections Below Chapters In books, chapters may (but do not need to) be broken up into sections, subsections, and so on. In articles, sections are the main structural element, and each article must contain at least one section. Use the sectn element. The n indicates the section number, which identifies the section level. The first sectn is sect1. You can have one or more of these in a chapter. They can contain one or more sect2 elements, and so on, down to sect5. Sections in Chapters A Sample Chapter Some text in the chapter. First Section (1.1) … Second Section (1.2) First Sub-Section (1.2.1) First Sub-Sub-Section (1.2.1.1) … Second Sub-Section (1.2.2) … ]]> This example includes section numbers in the section titles. You should not do this in your documents. Adding the section numbers is carried out by the stylesheets (of which more later), and you do not need to manage them yourself. Subdividing Using <sgmltag>part</sgmltag> Elements You can introduce another layer of organization between book and chapter with one or more parts. This cannot be done in an article. Introduction Overview ... What is FreeBSD? ... History ... ]]> Block Elements Paragraphs DocBook supports three types of paragraphs: formalpara, para, and simpara. Most of the time you will only need to use para. formalpara includes a title element, and simpara disallows some elements from within para. Stick with para. <sgmltag>para</sgmltag> Use: This is a paragraph. It can contain just about any other element. ]]> Appearance: This is a paragraph. It can contain just about any other element. Block Quotations A block quotation is an extended quotation from another document that should not appear within the current paragraph. You will probably only need it infrequently. Blockquotes can optionally contain a title and an attribution (or they can be left untitled and unattributed). <sgmltag>blockquote</sgmltag> Use: A small excerpt from the US Constitution:
Preamble to the Constitution of the United States Copied from a web site somewhere We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
]]> Appearance: A small excerpt from the US Constitution:
Preamble to the Constitution of the United States Copied from a web site somewhere We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Tips, Notes, Warnings, Cautions, Important Information and Sidebars You may need to include extra information separate from the main body of the text. Typically this is meta information that the user should be aware of. Depending on the nature of the information, one of tip, note, warning, caution, and important should be used. Alternatively, if the information is related to the main text but is not one of the above, use sidebar. The circumstances in which to choose one of these elements over another is unclear. The DocBook documentation suggests: A Note is for information that should be heeded by all readers. An Important element is a variation on Note. A Caution is for information regarding possible data loss or software damage. A Warning is for information regarding possible hardware damage or injury to life or limb. <sgmltag>warning</sgmltag> Use: Installing FreeBSD may make you want to delete Windows from your hard disk. ]]> Appearance: Installing FreeBSD may make you want to delete Windows from your hard disk. Lists and Procedures You will often need to list pieces of information to the user, or present them with a number of steps that must be carried out in order to accomplish a particular goal. In order to do this, use itemizedlist, orderedlist, or procedureThere are other types of list element in DocBook, but we are not concerned with those at the moment. itemizedlist and orderedlist are similar to their counterparts in HTML, ul and ol. Each one consists of one or more listitem elements, and each listitem contains one or more block elements. The listitem elements are analogous to HTML's li tags. However, unlike HTML, they are required. procedure is slightly different. It consists of steps, which may in turn consists of more steps or substeps. Each step contains block elements. <sgmltag>itemizedlist</sgmltag>, <sgmltag>orderedlist</sgmltag>, and <sgmltag>procedure</sgmltag> Use: This is the first itemized item. This is the second itemized item. This is the first ordered item. This is the second ordered item. Do this. Then do this. And now do this. ]]> Appearance: This is the first itemized item. This is the second itemized item. This is the first ordered item. This is the second ordered item. Do this. Then do this. And now do this. Showing File Samples If you want to show a fragment of a file (or perhaps a complete file) to the user, wrap it in the programlisting element. White space and line breaks within programlisting are significant. In particular, this means that the opening tag should appear on the same line as the first line of the output, and the closing tag should appear on the same line as the last line of the output, otherwise spurious blank lines may be included. <sgmltag>programlisting</sgmltag> Use: When you have finished, your program should look like this: #include <stdio.h> int main(void) { printf("hello, world\n"); }]]> Notice how the angle brackets in the #include line need to be referenced by their entities instead of being included literally. Appearance: When you have finished, your program should look like this: #include <stdio.h> int main(void) { printf("hello, world\n"); } Callouts A callout is a mechanism for referring back to an earlier piece of text or specific position within an earlier example without linking to it within the text. To do this, mark areas of interest in your example (programlisting, literallayout, or whatever) with the co element. Each element must have a unique id assigned to it. After the example include a calloutlist that refers back to the example and provides additional commentary. <sgmltag>co</sgmltag> and <sgmltag>calloutlist</sgmltag> When you have finished, your program should look like this: #include <stdio.h> int main(void) { printf("hello, world\n"); } Includes the standard IO header file. Specifies that main() returns an int. The printf() call that writes hello, world to standard output. ]]> Appearance: When you have finished, your program should look like this: #include <stdio.h> int main(void) { printf("hello, world\n"); } Includes the standard IO header file. Specifies that main() returns an int. The printf() call that writes hello, world to standard output. Tables Unlike HTML, you do not need to use tables for layout purposes, as the stylesheet handles those issues for you. Instead, just use tables for marking up tabular data. In general terms (and see the DocBook documentation for more detail) a table (which can be either formal or informal) consists of a table element. This contains at least one tgroup element, which specifies (as an attribute) the number of columns in this table group. Within the tablegroup you can then have one thead element, which contains elements for the table headings (column headings), and one tbody which contains the body of the table. Both tgroup and thead contain row elements, which in turn contain entry elements. Each entry element specifies one cell in the table. <sgmltag>informaltable</sgmltag> Use: This is Column Head 1 This is Column Head 2 Row 1, column 1 Row 1, column 2 Row 2, column 1 Row 2, column 2 ]]> Appearance: This is Column Head 1 This is Column Head 2 Row 1, column 1 Row 1, column 2 Row 2, column 1 Row 2, column 2 Always use the pgwide attribute with a value of 1 with the informaltable element. A bug in Internet Explorer can cause the table to render incorrectly if this is omitted. If you do not want a border around the table the frame attribute can be added to the informaltable element with a value of none (i.e., <informaltable frame="none">). Tables Where <literal>frame="none"</literal> Appearance: This is Column Head 1 This is Column Head 2 Row 1, column 1 Row 1, column 2 Row 2, column 1 Row 2, column 2 Examples for the User to Follow A lot of the time you need to show examples for the user to follow. Typically, these will consist of dialogs with the computer; the user types in a command, the user gets a response back, they type in another command, and so on. A number of distinct elements and entities come into play here. screen Everything the user sees in this example will be on the computer screen, so the next element is screen. Within screen, white space is significant. prompt, &prompt.root; and &prompt.user; Some of the things the user will be seeing on the screen are prompts from the computer (either from the operating system, command shell, or application). These should be marked up using prompt. As a special case, the two shell prompts for the normal user and the root user have been provided as entities. Every time you want to indicate the user is at a shell prompt, use one of &prompt.root; and &prompt.user; as necessary. They do not need to be inside prompt. &prompt.root; and &prompt.user; are FreeBSD extensions to DocBook, and are not part of the original DTD. userinput When displaying text that the user should type in, wrap it in userinput tags. It will probably be displayed differently to the user. <sgmltag>screen</sgmltag>, <sgmltag>prompt</sgmltag>, and <sgmltag>userinput</sgmltag> Use: &prompt.user; ls -1 foo1 foo2 foo3 &prompt.user; ls -1 | grep foo2 foo2 &prompt.user; su Password: &prompt.root; cat foo2 This is the file called 'foo2']]> Appearance: &prompt.user; ls -1 foo1 foo2 foo3 &prompt.user; ls -1 | grep foo2 foo2 &prompt.user; su Password: &prompt.root; cat foo2 This is the file called 'foo2' Even though we are displaying the contents of the file foo2, it is not marked up as programlisting. Reserve programlisting for showing fragments of files outside the context of user actions. In-line Elements Emphasizing Information When you want to emphasize a particular word or phrase, use emphasis. This may be presented as italic, or bold, or might be spoken differently with a text-to-speech system. There is no way to change the presentation of the emphasis within your document, no equivalent of HTML's b and i. If the information you are presenting is important then consider presenting it in important rather than emphasis. <sgmltag>emphasis</sgmltag> Use: FreeBSD is without doubt the premiere Unix like operating system for the Intel architecture.]]> Appearance: FreeBSD is without doubt the premiere Unix like operating system for the Intel architecture. Quotations To quote text from another document or source, or to denote a phrase that is used figuratively, use quote. Within a quote tag, you may use most of the markup tags available for normal text. Quotations Use: However, make sure that the search does not go beyond the boundary between local and public administration, as RFC 1535 calls it.]]> Appearance: However, make sure that the search does not go beyond the boundary between local and public administration, as RFC 1535 calls it. Keys, Mouse Buttons, and Combinations To refer to a specific key on the keyboard, use keycap. To refer to a mouse button, use mousebutton. And to refer to combinations of key presses or mouse clicks, wrap them all in keycombo. keycombo has an attribute called action, which may be one of click, double-click, other, press, seq, or simul. The last two values denote whether the keys or buttons should be pressed in sequence, or simultaneously. The stylesheets automatically add any connecting symbols, such as +, between the key names, when wrapped in keycombo. Keys, Mouse Buttons, and Combinations Use: To switch to the second virtual terminal, press Alt F1. To exit vi without saving your work, type Esc: q!. My window manager is configured so that Alt right mouse button is used to move windows.]]> Appearance: To switch to the second virtual terminal, press Alt F1. To exit vi without saving your work, type Esc: q!. My window manager is configured so that Alt right mouse button is used to move windows. Applications, Commands, Options, and Cites You will frequently want to refer to both applications and commands when writing documentation. The distinction between them is simple: an application is the name for a suite (or possibly - just 1) of programs that fulfil a particular task. A command is the + just 1) of programs that fulfill a particular task. A command is the name of a program that the user can run. In addition, you will occasionally need to list one or more of the options that a command might take. Finally, you will often want to list a command with its manual section number, in the command(number) format so common in Unix manuals. Mark up application names with application. When you want to list a command with its manual section number (which should be most of the time) the DocBook element is citerefentry. This will contain a further two elements, refentrytitle and manvolnum. The content of refentrytitle is the name of the command, and the content of manvolnum is the manual page section. This can be cumbersome to write, and so a series of general entities have been created to make this easier. Each entity takes the form &man.manual-page.manual-section;. The file that contains these entities is in doc/share/sgml/man-refs.ent, and can be referred to using this FPI: PUBLIC "-//FreeBSD//ENTITIES DocBook Manual Page Entities//EN" Therefore, the introduction to your documentation will probably look like this: <!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//FreeBSD//DTD DocBook V4.1-Based Extension//EN" [ <!ENTITY % man PUBLIC "-//FreeBSD//ENTITIES DocBook Manual Page Entities//EN"> %man; … ]> Use command when you want to include a command name in-line but present it as something the user should type in. Use option to mark up the options which will be passed to a command. When referring to the same command multiple times in close proximity it is preferred to use the &man.command.section; notation to markup the first reference and use command to markup subsequent references. This makes the generated output, especially HTML, appear visually better. This can be confusing, and sometimes the choice is not always clear. Hopefully this example makes it clearer. Applications, Commands, and Options Use: Sendmail is the most widely used Unix mail application. Sendmail includes the sendmail 8 , &man.mailq.1;, and &man.newaliases.1; programs. One of the command line parameters to sendmail 8 , , will display the current status of messages in the mail queue. Check this on the command line by running sendmail -bp.]]> Appearance: Sendmail is the most widely used Unix mail application. Sendmail includes the sendmail 8 , &man.mailq.1;, and &man.newaliases.1; programs. One of the command line parameters to sendmail 8 , , will display the current status of messages in the mail queue. Check this on the command line by running sendmail -bp. Notice how the &man.command.section; notation is easier to follow. Files, Directories, Extensions Whenever you wish to refer to the name of a file, a directory, or a file extension, use filename. <sgmltag>filename</sgmltag> Use: The SGML source for the Handbook in English can be found in /usr/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/. The first file is called book.sgml in that directory. You should also see a Makefile and a number of files with a .ent extension.]]> Appearance: The SGML source for the Handbook in English can be found in /usr/doc/en/handbook/. The first file is called handbook.sgml in that directory. You should also see a Makefile and a number of files with a .ent extension. The Name of Ports &os; Extension These elements are part of the FreeBSD extension to DocBook, and do not exist in the original DocBook DTD. You might need to include the name of a program from the FreeBSD Ports Collection in the documentation. Use the filename tag with the role attribute set to package to identify these. Since ports can be installed in any number of locations, only include the category and the port name; do not include /usr/ports. <sgmltag>filename</sgmltag> tag with <literal>package</literal> role Use: Install the net/ethereal port to view network traffic.]]> Appearance: Install the net/ethereal port to view network traffic. Devices &os; Extension These elements are part of the FreeBSD extension to DocBook, and do not exist in the original DocBook DTD. When referring to devices you have two choices. You can either refer to the device as it appears in /dev, or you can use the name of the device as it appears in the kernel. For this latter course, use devicename. Sometimes you will not have a choice. Some devices, such as networking cards, do not have entries in /dev, or the entries are markedly different from those entries. <sgmltag>devicename</sgmltag> Use: sio is used for serial communication in FreeBSD. sio manifests through a number of entries in /dev, including /dev/ttyd0 and /dev/cuaa0. By contrast, the networking devices, such as ed0 do not appear in /dev. In MS-DOS, the first floppy drive is referred to as a:. In FreeBSD it is /dev/fd0.]]> Appearance: sio is used for serial communication in FreeBSD. sio manifests through a number of entries in /dev, including /dev/ttyd0 and /dev/cuaa0. By contrast, the networking devices, such as ed0 do not appear in /dev. In MS-DOS, the first floppy drive is referred to as a:. In FreeBSD it is /dev/fd0. Hosts, Domains, IP Addresses, and So Forth &os; Extension These elements are part of the FreeBSD extension to DocBook, and do not exist in the original DocBook DTD. You can markup identification information for networked computers (hosts) in several ways, depending on the nature of the information. All of them use hostid as the element, with the role attribute selecting the type of the marked up information. No role attribute, or role="hostname" With no role attribute (i.e., hostid.../hostid) the marked up information is the simple hostname, such as freefall or wcarchive. You can explicitly specify this with role="hostname". role="domainname" The text is a domain name, such as FreeBSD.org or ngo.org.uk. There is no hostname component. role="fqdn" The text is a Fully Qualified Domain Name, with both hostname and domain name parts. role="ipaddr" The text is an IP address, probably expressed as a dotted quad. role="ip6addr" The text is an IPv6 address. role="netmask" The text is a network mask, which might be expressed as a dotted quad, a hexadecimal string, or as a / followed by a number. role="mac" The text is an Ethernet MAC address, expressed as a series of 2 digit hexadecimal numbers separated by colons. <sgmltag>hostid</sgmltag> and Roles Use: The local machine can always be referred to by the name localhost, which will have the IP address 127.0.0.1. The FreeBSD.org domain contains a number of different hosts, including freefall.FreeBSD.org and pointyhat.FreeBSD.org. When adding an IP alias to an interface (using ifconfig) always use a netmask of 255.255.255.255 (which can also be expressed as 0xffffffff). The MAC address uniquely identifies every network card in existence. A typical MAC address looks like 08:00:20:87:ef:d0.]]> Appearance: The local machine can always be referred to by the name localhost, which will have the IP address 127.0.0.1. The FreeBSD.org domain contains a number of different hosts, including freefall.FreeBSD.org and bento.FreeBSD.org. When adding an IP alias to an interface (using ifconfig) always use a netmask of 255.255.255.255 (which can also be expressed as 0xffffffff). The MAC address uniquely identifies every network card in existence. A typical MAC address looks like 08:00:20:87:ef:d0. Usernames &os; Extension These elements are part of the FreeBSD extension to DocBook, and do not exist in the original DocBook DTD. When you need to refer to a specific username, such as root or bin, use username. <sgmltag>username</sgmltag> Use: To carry out most system administration functions you will need to be root.]]> Appearance: To carry out most system administration functions you will need to be root. Describing <filename>Makefile</filename>s &os; Extension These elements are part of the FreeBSD extension to DocBook, and do not exist in the original DocBook DTD. Two elements exist to describe parts of Makefiles, maketarget and makevar. maketarget identifies a build target exported by a Makefile that can be given as a parameter to make. makevar identifies a variable that can be set (in the environment, on the make command line, or within the Makefile) to influence the process. <sgmltag>maketarget</sgmltag> and <sgmltag>makevar</sgmltag> Use: Two common targets in a Makefile are all and clean. Typically, invoking all will rebuild the application, and invoking clean will remove the temporary files (.o for example) created by the build process. clean may be controlled by a number of variables, including CLOBBER and RECURSE.]]> Appearance: Two common targets in a Makefile are all and clean. Typically, invoking all will rebuild the application, and invoking clean will remove the temporary files (.o for example) created by the build process. clean may be controlled by a number of variables, including CLOBBER and RECURSE. Literal Text You will often need to include literal text in the documentation. This is text that is excerpted from another file, or which should be copied from the documentation into another file verbatim. Some of the time, programlisting will be sufficient to denote this text. programlisting is not always appropriate, particularly when you want to include a portion of a file in-line with the rest of the paragraph. On these occasions, use literal. <sgmltag>literal</sgmltag> Use: The maxusers 10 line in the kernel configuration file determines the size of many system tables, and is a rough guide to how many simultaneous logins the system will support.]]> Appearance: The maxusers 10 line in the kernel configuration file determines the size of many system tables, and is a rough guide to how many simultaneous logins the system will support. Showing Items That the User <emphasis>Must</emphasis> Fill In There will often be times when you want to show the user what to do, or refer to a file, or command line, or similar, where the user cannot simply copy the examples that you provide, but must instead include some information themselves. replaceable is designed for this eventuality. Use it inside other elements to indicate parts of that element's content that the user must replace. <sgmltag>replaceable</sgmltag> Use: &prompt.user; man command]]> Appearance: &prompt.user; man command replaceable can be used in many different elements, including literal. This example also shows that replaceable should only be wrapped around the content that the user is meant to provide. The other content should be left alone. Use: The maxusers n line in the kernel configuration file determines the size of many system tables, and is a rough guide to how many simultaneous logins the system will support. For a desktop workstation, 32 is a good value for n.]]> Appearance: The maxusers n line in the kernel configuration file determines the size of many system tables, and is a rough guide to how many simultaneous logins the system will support. For a desktop workstation, 32 is a good value for n. Quoting System Errors You might want to show errors generated by FreeBSD. Mark these with errorname. This indicates the exact error that appears. <sgmltag>errorname</sgmltag> Use: Panic: cannot mount root ]]> Appearance: Panic: cannot mount root Images Image support in the documentation is currently extremely experimental. The mechanisms described here are unlikely to change, but that is not guaranteed. You will also need to install the graphics/ImageMagick port, which is used to convert between the different image formats. This is a big port, and most of it is not required. However, while we are working on the Makefiles and other infrastructure it makes things easier. This port is not in the textproc/docproj meta port, you must install it by hand. The best example of what follows in practice is the doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/vm-design/ document. If you are unsure of the description that follows, take a look at the files in that directory to see how everything hangs together. Experiment with creating different formatted versions of the document to see how the image markup appears in the formatted output. Image Formats We currently support two formats for images. The format you should use will depend on the nature of your image. For images that are primarily vector based, such as network diagrams, time lines, and similar, use Encapsulated Postscript, and make sure that your images have the .eps extension. For bitmaps, such as screen captures, use the Portable Network Graphic format, and make sure that your images have the .png extension. These are the only formats in which images should be committed to the CVS repository. Use the right format for the right image. It is to be expected that your documentation will have a mix of EPS and PNG images. The Makefiles ensure that the correct format image is chosen depending on the output format that you use for your documentation. Do not commit the same image to the repository in two different formats. It is anticipated that the Documentation Project will switch to using the Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) format for vector images. However, the current state of SVG capable editing tools makes this impractical. Markup The markup for an image is relatively simple. First, markup a mediaobject. The mediaobject can contain other, more specific objects. We are concerned with two, the imageobject and the textobject. You should include one imageobject, and two textobject elements. The imageobject will point to the name of the image file that will be used (without the extension). The textobject elements contain information that will be presented to the user as well as, or instead of, the image. There are two circumstances where this can happen. When the reader is viewing the documentation in HTML. In this case, each image will need to have associated alternate text to show the user, typically whilst the image is loading, or if they hover the mouse pointer over the image. When the reader is viewing the documentation in plain text. In this case, each image should have an ASCII art equivalent to show the user. An example will probably make things easier to understand. Suppose you have an image, called fig1, that you want to include in the document. This image is of a rectangle with an A inside it. The markup for this would be as follows. <mediaobject> <imageobject> <imagedata fileref="fig1"> </imageobject> <textobject> <literallayout class="monospaced">+---------------+ | A | +---------------+</literallayout> </textobject> <textobject> <phrase>A picture</phrase> </textobject> </mediaobject> Include an imagedata element inside the imageobject element. The fileref attribute should contain the filename of the image to include, without the extension. The stylesheets will work out which extension should be added to the filename automatically. The first textobject should contain a literallayout element, where the class attribute is set to monospaced. This is your opportunity to demonstrate your ASCII art skills. This content will be used if the document is converted to plain text. Notice how the first and last lines of the content of the literallayout element butt up next to the element's tags. This ensures no extraneous white space is included. The second textobject should contain a single phrase element. The contents of this will become the alt attribute for the image when this document is converted to HTML. <filename>Makefile</filename> Entries Your images must be listed in the Makefile in the IMAGES variable. This variable should contain the name of all your source images. For example, if you have created three figures, fig1.eps, fig2.png, fig3.png, then your Makefile should have lines like this in it. … IMAGES= fig1.eps fig2.png fig3.png … or … IMAGES= fig1.eps IMAGES+= fig2.png IMAGES+= fig3.png … Again, the Makefile will work out the complete list of images it needs to build your source document, you only need to list the image files you provided. Images and Chapters in Subdirectories You must be careful when you separate your documentation into smaller files (see ) in different directories. Suppose you have a book with three chapters, and the chapters are stored in their own directories, called chapter1/chapter.sgml, chapter2/chapter.sgml, and chapter3/chapter.sgml. If each chapter has images associated with it, it is suggested to place those images in each chapter's subdirectory (chapter1/, chapter2/, and chapter3/). However, if you do this you must include the directory names in the IMAGES variable in the Makefile, and you must include the directory name in the imagedata element in your document. For example, if you have chapter1/fig1.png, then chapter1/chapter.sgml should contain: <mediaobject> <imageobject> <imagedata fileref="chapter1/fig1"> </imageobject> … </mediaobject> The directory name must be included in the fileref attribute. The Makefile must contain: … IMAGES= chapter1/fig1.png … Then everything should just work. Links Links are also in-line elements. Linking to Other Parts of the Same Document Linking within the same document requires you to specify where you are linking from (i.e., the text the user will click, or otherwise indicate, as the source of the link) and where you are linking to (the link's destination). Each element within DocBook has an attribute called id. You can place text in this attribute to uniquely name the element it is attached to. This value will be used when you specify the link source. Normally, you will only be linking to chapters or sections, so you would add the id attribute to these elements. Attribute <literal>id</literal> on Chapters and Sections Introduction This is the introduction. It contains a subsection, which is identified as well. Sub-sect 1 This is the subsection. ]]> Obviously, you should use more descriptive values. The values must be unique within the document (i.e., not just the file, but the document the file might be included in as well). Notice how the id for the subsection is constructed by appending text to the id of the chapter. This helps to ensure that they are unique. If you want to allow the user to jump into a specific portion of the document (possibly in the middle of a paragraph or an example), use anchor. This element has no content, but takes an id attribute. <sgmltag>anchor</sgmltag> This paragraph has an embedded link target in it. It will not show up in the document.]]> When you want to provide the user with a link they can activate (probably by clicking) to go to a section of the document that has an id attribute, you can use either xref or link. Both of these elements have a linkend attribute. The value of this attribute should be the value that you have used in a id attribute (it does not matter if that value has not yet occurred in your document; this will work for forward links as well as backward links). If you use xref then you have no control over the text of the link. It will be generated for you. Using <sgmltag>xref</sgmltag> Assume that this fragment appears somewhere in a document that includes the id example: More information can be found in . More specific information can be found in .]]> The text of the link will be generated automatically, and will look like (emphasized text indicates the text that will be the link):
More information can be found in Chapter One. More specific information can be found in the section called Sub-Sect 1.
Notice how the text from the link is derived from the section title or the chapter number. This means that you cannot use xref to link to an id attribute on an anchor element. The anchor has no content, so the xref cannot generate the text for the link. If you want to control the text of the link then use link. This element wraps content, and the content will be used for the link. Using <sgmltag>link</sgmltag> Assume that this fragment appears somewhere in a document that includes the id example. More information can be found in the first chapter. More specific information can be found in this section.]]> This will generate the following (emphasized text indicates the text that will be the link):
More information can be found in the first chapter. More specific information can be found in this section.
That last one is a bad example. Never use words like this or here as the source for the link. The reader will need to hunt around the surrounding context to see where the link is actually taking them. You can use link to include a link to an id on an anchor element, since the link content defines the text that will be used for the link. Linking to Documents on the WWW Linking to external documents is much simpler, as long as you know the URL of the document you want to link to. Use ulink. The url attribute is the URL of the page that the link points to, and the content of the element is the text that will be displayed for the user to activate. <sgmltag>ulink</sgmltag> Use: Of course, you could stop reading this document and go to the FreeBSD home page instead.]]> Appearance: Of course, you could stop reading this document and go to the FreeBSD home page instead. diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/book.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/book.sgml index 0b1e478bcd..51f058e47d 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/book.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/book.sgml @@ -1,14527 +1,14527 @@ %books.ent; ]> FreeBSD Porter's Handbook The FreeBSD Documentation Project April 2000 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 The FreeBSD Documentation Project &bookinfo.trademarks; &bookinfo.legalnotice; Introduction The FreeBSD ports collection is the way almost everyone installs applications ("ports") on FreeBSD. Like everything else about FreeBSD, it is primarily a volunteer effort. It is important to keep this in mind when reading this document. In FreeBSD, anyone may submit a new port, or volunteer to maintain an existing port if it is unmaintained—you do not need any special commit privileges to do so. Making a port yourself So, you are interested in making your own port or upgrading an existing one? Great! What follows are some guidelines for creating a new port for FreeBSD. If you want to upgrade an existing port, you should read this and then read . When this document is not sufficiently detailed, you should refer to /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.port.mk, which all port Makefiles include. Even if you do not hack Makefiles daily, it is well commented, and you will still gain much knowledge from it. Additionally, you may send specific questions to the &a.ports;. Only a fraction of the variables (VAR) that can be overridden are mentioned in this document. Most (if not all) are documented at the start of /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.port.mk; the others probably ought to be. Note that this file uses a non-standard tab setting: Emacs and Vim should recognize the setting on loading the file. Both &man.vi.1; and &man.ex.1; can be set to use the correct value by typing :set tabstop=4 once the file has been loaded. Quick Porting This section tells you how to do a quick port. In many cases, it is not sufficient, so you will have to read further on into the document. First, get the original tarball and put it into DISTDIR, which defaults to /usr/ports/distfiles. The following assumes that the software compiled out-of-the-box, i.e., there was absolutely no change required for the port to work on your FreeBSD box. If you needed to change something, you will have to refer to the next section too. Writing the <filename>Makefile</filename> The minimal Makefile would look something like this: # New ports collection makefile for: oneko # Date created: 5 December 1994 # Whom: asami # # $FreeBSD$ # PORTNAME= oneko PORTVERSION= 1.1b CATEGORIES= games MASTER_SITES= ftp://ftp.cs.columbia.edu/archives/X11R5/contrib/ MAINTAINER= asami@FreeBSD.org COMMENT= A cat chasing a mouse all over the screen MAN1= oneko.1 MANCOMPRESSED= yes USE_IMAKE= yes .include <bsd.port.mk> See if you can figure it out. Do not worry about the contents of the $FreeBSD$ line, it will be filled in automatically by CVS when the port is imported to our main ports tree. You can find a more detailed example in the sample Makefile section. Writing the description files There are two description files that are required for any port, whether they actually package or not. They are pkg-descr and pkg-plist. Their pkg- prefix distinguishes them from other files. <filename>pkg-descr</filename> This is a longer description of the port. One to a few paragraphs concisely explaining what the port does is sufficient. This is not a manual or an in-depth description on how to use or compile the port! Please be careful if you are copying from the README or manpage; too often they are not a concise description of the port or are in an awkward format (e.g., manpages have justified spacing). If the ported software has an official WWW homepage, you should list it here. Prefix one of the websites with WWW: so that automated tools will work correctly. The following example shows how your pkg-descr should look: This is a port of oneko, in which a cat chases a poor mouse all over the screen. : (etc.) WWW: http://www.oneko.org/ <filename>pkg-plist</filename> This file lists all the files installed by the port. It is also called the packing list because the package is generated by packing the files listed here. The pathnames are relative to the installation prefix (usually /usr/local or /usr/X11R6). If you are using the MANn variables (as you should be), do not list any manpages here. If the port creates directories during installation, make sure to add @dirrm lines to remove them when the package is deleted. Here is a small example: bin/oneko lib/X11/app-defaults/Oneko lib/X11/oneko/cat1.xpm lib/X11/oneko/cat2.xpm lib/X11/oneko/mouse.xpm @dirrm lib/X11/oneko Refer to the &man.pkg.create.1; manual page for details on the packing list. It is recommended that you keep all the filenames in this file sorted alphabetically. It will make verifying the changes when you upgrade the port much easier. Creating a packing list manually can be a very tedious task. If the port installs a large numbers of files, creating the packing list automatically might save time. There is only one case when pkg-plist can be omitted from a port. If the port installs just a handful of files, and perhaps directories, the files and directories may be listed in the variables PLIST_FILES and PLIST_DIRS, respectively, within the port's Makefile. For instance, we could get along without pkg-plist in the above oneko port by adding the following lines to the Makefile: PLIST_FILES= bin/oneko \ lib/X11/app-defaults/Oneko \ lib/X11/oneko/cat1.xpm \ lib/X11/oneko/cat2.xpm \ lib/X11/oneko/mouse.xpm PLIST_DIRS= lib/X11/oneko Of course, PLIST_DIRS should be left unset if a port installs no directories of its own. The price for this way of listing port's files and directories is that you cannot use command sequences described in &man.pkg.create.1;. Therefore, it is suitable only for simple ports and makes them even simpler. At the same time, it has the advantage of reducing the number of files in the ports collection. Please consider using this technique before you resort to pkg-plist. Later we will see how pkg-plist and PLIST_FILES can be used to fulfill more sophisticated tasks. Creating the checksum file Just type make makesum. The ports make rules will automatically generate the file distinfo. If a file fetched has its checksum changed regularly and you are certain the source is trusted (i.e. it comes from manufacturer CDs or documentation generated daily), you should specify these files in the IGNOREFILES variable. Then the checksum is not calculated for that file when you run make makesum, but set to IGNORE. Testing the port You should make sure that the port rules do exactly what you want them to do, including packaging up the port. These are the important points you need to verify. pkg-plist does not contain anything not installed by your port pkg-plist contains everything that is installed by your port Your port can be installed multiple times using the reinstall target Your port cleans up after itself upon deinstall Recommended test ordering make install make package make deinstall pkg_add package-name make deinstall make reinstall make package Make sure that there are not any warnings issued in any of the package and deinstall stages. After step 3, check to see if all the new directories are correctly deleted. Also, try using the software after step 4, to ensure that it works correctly when installed from a package. The most thorough way to automate these steps is via installing the ports tinderbox. This maintains jails in which you can test all of the above steps without changing the state of your running system. Please see ports/ports-mgmt/tinderbox for more information. Checking your port with <command>portlint</command> Please use portlint to see if your port conforms to our guidelines. The ports-mgmt/portlint program is part of the ports collection. In particular, you may want to check if the Makefile is in the right shape and the package is named appropriately. Submitting the port First, make sure you have read the DOs and DON'Ts section. Now that you are happy with your port, the only thing remaining is to put it in the main &os; ports tree and make everybody else happy about it too. We do not need your work directory or the pkgname.tgz package, so delete them now. Next, assuming your port is called oneko, cd to the directory above where the oneko directory is located, and then type the following: shar `find oneko` > oneko.shar Include your oneko.shar file in a bug report and send it with the &man.send-pr.1; program (see Bug Reports and General Commentary for more information about &man.send-pr.1;). Be sure to classify the bug report as category ports and class change-request (Do not mark the report confidential!). Also add a short description of the program you ported to the Description field of the PR and the shar file to the Fix field. You can make our work a lot easier, if you use a good description in the synopsis of the problem report. We prefer something like New port: <category>/<portname> <short description of the port> for new ports and Update port: <category>/<portname> <short description of the update> for port updates. If you stick to this scheme, the chance that someone will take a look at your PR soon is much better. One more time, do not include the original source distfile, the work directory, or the package you built with make package. After you have submitted your port, please be patient. Sometimes it can take a few months before a port is included in &os;, although it might only take a few days. You can view the list of ports waiting to be committed to &os;. Once we have looked at your port, we will get back to you if necessary, and put it in the tree. Your name will also appear in the list of Additional FreeBSD Contributors and other files. Isn't that great?!? :-) Slow Porting Ok, so it was not that simple, and the port required some modifications to get it to work. In this section, we will explain, step by step, how to modify it to get it to work with the ports paradigm. How things work First, this is the sequence of events which occurs when the user first types make in your port's directory. You may find that having bsd.port.mk in another window while you read this really helps to understand it. But do not worry if you do not really understand what bsd.port.mk is doing, not many people do... :-> The fetch target is run. The fetch target is responsible for making sure that the tarball exists locally in DISTDIR. If fetch cannot find the required files in DISTDIR it will look up the URL MASTER_SITES, which is set in the Makefile, as well as our main FTP site at , where we put sanctioned distfiles as backup. It will then attempt to fetch the named distribution file with FETCH, assuming that the requesting site has direct access to the Internet. If that succeeds, it will save the file in DISTDIR for future use and proceed. The extract target is run. It looks for your port's distribution file (typically a gzip'd tarball) in DISTDIR and unpacks it into a temporary subdirectory specified by WRKDIR (defaults to work). The patch target is run. First, any patches defined in PATCHFILES are applied. Second, if any patch files named patch-* are found in PATCHDIR (defaults to the files subdirectory), they are applied at this time in alphabetical order. The configure target is run. This can do any one of many different things. If it exists, scripts/configure is run. If HAS_CONFIGURE or GNU_CONFIGURE is set, WRKSRC/configure is run. If USE_IMAKE is set, XMKMF (default: xmkmf -a) is run. The build target is run. This is responsible for descending into the port's private working directory (WRKSRC) and building it. If USE_GMAKE is set, GNU make will be used, otherwise the system make will be used. The above are the default actions. In addition, you can define targets pre-something or post-something, or put scripts with those names, in the scripts subdirectory, and they will be run before or after the default actions are done. For example, if you have a post-extract target defined in your Makefile, and a file pre-build in the scripts subdirectory, the post-extract target will be called after the regular extraction actions, and the pre-build script will be executed before the default build rules are done. It is recommended that you use Makefile targets if the actions are simple enough, because it will be easier for someone to figure out what kind of non-default action the port requires. The default actions are done by the bsd.port.mk targets do-something. For example, the commands to extract a port are in the target do-extract. If you are not happy with the default target, you can fix it by redefining the do-something target in your Makefile. The main targets (e.g., extract, configure, etc.) do nothing more than make sure all the stages up to that one are completed and call the real targets or scripts, and they are not intended to be changed. If you want to fix the extraction, fix do-extract, but never ever change the way extract operates! Now that you understand what goes on when the user types make, let us go through the recommended steps to create the perfect port. Getting the original sources Get the original sources (normally) as a compressed tarball (foo.tar.gz or foo.tar.Z) and copy it into DISTDIR. Always use mainstream sources when and where you can. You will need to set the variable MASTER_SITES to reflect where the original tarball resides. You will find convenient shorthand definitions for most mainstream sites in bsd.sites.mk. Please use these sites—and the associated definitions—if at all possible, to help avoid the problem of having the same information repeated over again many times in the source base. As these sites tend to change over time, this becomes a maintenance nightmare for everyone involved. If you cannot find a FTP/HTTP site that is well-connected to the net, or can only find sites that have irritatingly non-standard formats, you might want to put a copy on a reliable FTP or HTTP server that you control (e.g., your home page). If you cannot find somewhere convenient and reliable to put the distfile we can house it ourselves on ftp.FreeBSD.org; however, this is the least-preferred solution. The distfile must be placed into ~/public_distfiles/ of someone's freefall account. Ask the person who commits your port to do this. This person will also set MASTER_SITES to MASTER_SITE_LOCAL and MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR to their freefall username. If your port's distfile changes all the time without any kind of version update by the author, consider putting the distfile on your home page and listing it as the first MASTER_SITES. If you can, try to talk the port author out of doing this; it really does help to establish some kind of source code control. Hosting your own version will prevent users from getting checksum mismatch errors, and also reduce the workload of maintainers of our FTP site. Also, if there is only one master site for the port, it is recommended that you house a backup at your site and list it as the second MASTER_SITES. If your port requires some additional `patches' that are available on the Internet, fetch them too and put them in DISTDIR. Do not worry if they come from a site other than where you got the main source tarball, we have a way to handle these situations (see the description of PATCHFILES below). Modifying the port Unpack a copy of the tarball in a private directory and make whatever changes are necessary to get the port to compile properly under the current version of &os;. Keep careful track of everything you do, as you will be automating the process shortly. Everything, including the deletion, addition, or modification of files should be doable using an automated script or patch file when your port is finished. If your port requires significant user interaction/customization to compile or install, you should take a look at one of Larry Wall's classic Configure scripts and perhaps do something similar yourself. The goal of the new ports collection is to make each port as plug-and-play as possible for the end-user while using a minimum of disk space. Unless explicitly stated, patch files, scripts, and other files you have created and contributed to the &os; ports collection are assumed to be covered by the standard BSD copyright conditions. Patching In the preparation of the port, files that have been added or changed can be picked up with a &man.diff.1; for later feeding to &man.patch.1;. Each patch you wish to apply should be saved into a file named patch-* where * indicates the pathname of the file that is patched, such as patch-Imakefile or patch-src-config.h. These files should be stored in PATCHDIR (usually files/, from where they will be automatically applied. All patches must be relative to WRKSRC (generally the directory your port's tarball unpacks itself into, that being where the build is done). To make fixes and upgrades easier, you should avoid having more than one patch fix the same file (e.g., patch-file and patch-file2 both changing WRKSRC/foobar.c). Please only use characters [-+._a-zA-Z0-9] for naming your patches. Do not use any other characters besides them. Do not name your patches like patch-aa or patch-ab etc, always mention path and file name in patch names. Do not put RCS strings in patches. CVS will mangle them when we put the files into the ports tree, and when we check them out again, they will come out different and the patch will fail. RCS strings are surrounded by dollar ($) signs, and typically start with $Id or $RCS. Using the recurse () option to &man.diff.1; to generate patches is fine, but please take a look at the resulting patches to make sure you do not have any unnecessary junk in there. In particular, diffs between two backup files, Makefiles when the port uses Imake or GNU configure, etc., are unnecessary and should be deleted. If you had to edit configure.in and run autoconf to regenerate configure, do not take the diffs of configure (it often grows to a few thousand lines!); define USE_AUTOTOOLS=autoconf:261 and take the diffs of configure.in. Also, try to minimize the amount of non-functional whitespace changes in your patches. It is common in Open Source world that projects share large amount of code base, but obey different style and indenting rules. If you take working piece of functionality from one project to fix similar area in another, please be careful: the resulting line patch may be full of non-functional changes. It does not only increase the size of the CVS repository but makes it hard to find out what had exactly caused the problem and what did you change at all. If you had to delete a file, then you can do it in the post-extract target rather than as part of the patch. Simple replacements can be performed directly from the port Makefile using the in-place mode of &man.sed.1;. This is very useful when you need to patch in a variable value. Example: post-patch: @${REINPLACE_CMD} -e 's|for Linux|for FreeBSD|g' ${WRKSRC}/README @${REINPLACE_CMD} -e 's|-pthread|${PTHREAD_LIBS}|' ${WRKSRC}/configure Quite often, there is a situation when the software being ported, especially if it is primarily developed on &windows;, uses the CR/LF convention for most of its source files. This may cause problems with further patching, compiler warnings, scripts execution (/bin/sh^M not found), etc. To quickly convert all files from CR/LF to just LF, add USE_DOS2UNIX=yes to the port Makefile. A list of files to convert can be specified: USE_DOS2UNIX= util.c util.h If you want to convert a group of files across subdirectories, DOS2UNIX_REGEX can be used. Its argument is a find compatible regular expression. More on the format is in &man.re.format.7;. This option is useful for converting all files of a given extension, for example all source code files leaving binary files intact: USE_DOS2UNIX= yes DOS2UNIX_REGEX= .*\.(c|cpp|h) Configuring Include any additional customization commands in your configure script and save it in the scripts subdirectory. As mentioned above, you can also do this with Makefile targets and/or scripts with the name pre-configure or post-configure. Handling user input If your port requires user input to build, configure, or install, you must set IS_INTERACTIVE in your Makefile. This will allow overnight builds to skip your port if the user sets the variable BATCH in his environment (and if the user sets the variable INTERACTIVE, then only those ports requiring interaction are built). This will save a lot of wasted time on the set of machines that continually build ports (see below). It is also recommended that if there are reasonable default answers to the questions, you check the PACKAGE_BUILDING variable and turn off the interactive script when it is set. This will allow us to build the packages for CDROMs and FTP. Configuring the Makefile Configuring the Makefile is pretty simple, and again we suggest that you look at existing examples before starting. Also, there is a sample Makefile in this handbook, so take a look and please follow the ordering of variables and sections in that template to make your port easier for others to read. Now, consider the following problems in sequence as you design your new Makefile: The original source Does it live in DISTDIR as a standard gzip'd tarball named something like foozolix-1.2.tar.gz? If so, you can go on to the next step. If not, you should look at overriding any of the DISTVERSION, DISTNAME, EXTRACT_CMD, EXTRACT_BEFORE_ARGS, EXTRACT_AFTER_ARGS, EXTRACT_SUFX, or DISTFILES variables, depending on how alien a format your port's distribution file is. (The most common case is EXTRACT_SUFX=.tar.Z, when the tarball is condensed by regular compress, not gzip.) In the worst case, you can simply create your own do-extract target to override the default, though this should be rarely, if ever, necessary. Naming The first part of the port's Makefile names the port, describes its version number, and lists it in the correct category. <makevar>PORTNAME</makevar> and <makevar>PORTVERSION</makevar> You should set PORTNAME to the base name of your port, and PORTVERSION to the version number of the port. <makevar>PORTREVISION</makevar> and <makevar>PORTEPOCH</makevar> <makevar>PORTREVISION</makevar> The PORTREVISION variable is a monotonically increasing value which is reset to 0 with every increase of PORTVERSION (i.e. every time a new official vendor release is made), and appended to the package name if non-zero. Changes to PORTREVISION are used by automated tools (e.g. &man.pkg.version.1;) to highlight the fact that a new package is available. PORTREVISION should be increased each time a change is made to the port which significantly affects the content or structure of the derived package. Examples of when PORTREVISION should be bumped: Addition of patches to correct security vulnerabilities, bugs, or to add new functionality to the port. Changes to the port Makefile to enable or disable compile-time options in the package. Changes in the packing list or the install-time behavior of the package (e.g. change to a script which generates initial data for the package, like ssh host keys). Version bump of a port's shared library dependency (in this case, someone trying to install the old package after installing a newer version of the dependency will fail since it will look for the old libfoo.x instead of libfoo.(x+1)). Silent changes to the port distfile which have significant functional differences, i.e. changes to the distfile requiring a correction to distinfo with no corresponding change to PORTVERSION, where a diff -ru of the old and new versions shows non-trivial changes to the code. Examples of changes which do not require a PORTREVISION bump: Style changes to the port skeleton with no functional change to what appears in the resulting package. Changes to MASTER_SITES or other functional changes to the port which do not affect the resulting package. Trivial patches to the distfile such as correction of typos, which are not important enough that users of the package should go to the trouble of upgrading. Build fixes which cause a package to become compilable where it was previously failing (as long as the changes do not introduce any functional change on any other platforms on which the port did previously build). Since PORTREVISION reflects the content of the package, if the package was not previously buildable then there is no need to increase PORTREVISION to mark a change. A rule of thumb is to ask yourself whether a change committed to a port is something which everyone would benefit from having (either because of an enhancement, fix, or by virtue that the new package will actually work at all), and weigh that against that fact that it will cause everyone who regularly updates their ports tree to be compelled to update. If yes, the PORTREVISION should be bumped. <makevar>PORTEPOCH</makevar> From time to time a software vendor or FreeBSD porter will do something silly and release a version of their software which is actually numerically less than the previous version. An example of this is a port which goes from foo-20000801 to foo-1.0 (the former will be incorrectly treated as a newer version since 20000801 is a numerically greater value than 1). In situations such as this, the PORTEPOCH version should be increased. If PORTEPOCH is nonzero it is appended to the package name as described in section 0 above. PORTEPOCH must never be decreased or reset to zero, because that would cause comparison to a package from an earlier epoch to fail (i.e. the package would not be detected as out of date): the new version number (e.g. 1.0,1 in the above example) is still numerically less than the previous version (20000801), but the ,1 suffix is treated specially by automated tools and found to be greater than the implied suffix ,0 on the earlier package. Dropping or resetting PORTEPOCH incorrectly leads to no end of grief; if you do not understand the above discussion, please keep after it until you do, or ask questions on the mailing lists. It is expected that PORTEPOCH will not be used for the majority of ports, and that sensible - use of PORTVERSION can often pre-empt + use of PORTVERSION can often preempt it becoming necessary if a future release of the software should change the version structure. However, care is needed by FreeBSD porters when a vendor release is made without an official version number — such as a code snapshot release. The temptation is to label the release with the release date, which will cause problems as in the example above when a new official release is made. For example, if a snapshot release is made on the date 20000917, and the previous version of the software was version 1.2, the snapshot release should be given a PORTVERSION of 1.2.20000917 or similar, not 20000917, so that the succeeding release, say 1.3, is still a numerically greater value. Example of <makevar>PORTREVISION</makevar> and <makevar>PORTEPOCH</makevar> usage The gtkmumble port, version 0.10, is committed to the ports collection: PORTNAME= gtkmumble PORTVERSION= 0.10 PKGNAME becomes gtkmumble-0.10. A security hole is discovered which requires a local FreeBSD patch. PORTREVISION is bumped accordingly. PORTNAME= gtkmumble PORTVERSION= 0.10 PORTREVISION= 1 PKGNAME becomes gtkmumble-0.10_1 A new version is released by the vendor, numbered 0.2 (it turns out the author actually intended 0.10 to actually mean 0.1.0, not what comes after 0.9 - oops, too late now). Since the new minor version 2 is numerically less than the previous version 10, the PORTEPOCH must be bumped to manually force the new package to be detected as newer. Since it is a new vendor release of the code, PORTREVISION is reset to 0 (or removed from the Makefile). PORTNAME= gtkmumble PORTVERSION= 0.2 PORTEPOCH= 1 PKGNAME becomes gtkmumble-0.2,1 The next release is 0.3. Since PORTEPOCH never decreases, the version variables are now: PORTNAME= gtkmumble PORTVERSION= 0.3 PORTEPOCH= 1 PKGNAME becomes gtkmumble-0.3,1 If PORTEPOCH were reset to 0 with this upgrade, someone who had installed the gtkmumble-0.10_1 package would not detect the gtkmumble-0.3 package as newer, since 3 is still numerically less than 10. Remember, this is the whole point of PORTEPOCH in the first place. <makevar>PKGNAMEPREFIX</makevar> and <makevar>PKGNAMESUFFIX</makevar> Two optional variables, PKGNAMEPREFIX and PKGNAMESUFFIX, are combined with PORTNAME and PORTVERSION to form PKGNAME as ${PKGNAMEPREFIX}${PORTNAME}${PKGNAMESUFFIX}-${PORTVERSION}. Make sure this conforms to our guidelines for a good package name. In particular, you are not allowed to use a hyphen (-) in PORTVERSION. Also, if the package name has the language- or the -compiled.specifics part (see below), use PKGNAMEPREFIX and PKGNAMESUFFIX, respectively. Do not make them part of PORTNAME. <makevar>LATEST_LINK</makevar> In some cases, several versions of a program may be present in the ports collection at the same time. Both the index build and the package build system need to be able to see them as different, independent ports, although they may all have the same PORTNAME, PKGNAMEPREFIX, and even PKGNAMESUFFIX. In those cases, the optional LATEST_LINK variable should be set to a different value for all ports except the main one — see the editors/vim5 and editors/vim ports, and the www/apache* family for examples of its use. Note that how to choose a main version — most popular, best supported, least patched, and so on — is outside the scope of this handbook's recommendations; we only tell you how to specify the other ports' versions after you have picked a main one. Package Naming Conventions The following are the conventions you should follow in naming your packages. This is to have our package directory easy to scan, as there are already thousands of packages and users are going to turn away if they hurt their eyes! The package name should look like language_region-name-compiled.specifics-version.numbers. The package name is defined as ${PKGNAMEPREFIX}${PORTNAME}${PKGNAMESUFFIX}-${PORTVERSION}. Make sure to set the variables to conform to that format. FreeBSD strives to support the native language of its users. The language- part should be a two letter abbreviation of the natural language defined by ISO-639 if the port is specific to a certain language. Examples are ja for Japanese, ru for Russian, vi for Vietnamese, zh for Chinese, ko for Korean and de for German. If the port is specific to a certain region within the language area, add the two letter country code as well. Examples are en_US for US English and fr_CH for Swiss French. The language- part should be set in the PKGNAMEPREFIX variable. The first letter of the name part should be lowercase. (The rest of the name may contain capital letters, so use your own discretion when you are converting a software name that has some capital letters in it.) There is a tradition of naming Perl 5 modules by prepending p5- and converting the double-colon separator to a hyphen; for example, the Data::Dumper module becomes p5-Data-Dumper. Make sure that the port's name and version are clearly separated and placed into the PORTNAME and PORTVERSION variables. The only reason for PORTNAME to contain a version part is if the upstream distribution is really named that way, as in the textproc/libxml2 or japanese/kinput2-freewnn ports. Otherwise, the PORTNAME should not contain any version-specific information. It is quite normal for several ports to have the same PORTNAME, as the www/apache* ports do; in that case, different versions (and different index entries) are distinguished by the PKGNAMEPREFIX, PKGNAMESUFFIX, and LATEST_LINK values. If the port can be built with different hardcoded defaults (usually part of the directory name in a family of ports), the -compiled.specifics part should state the compiled-in defaults (the hyphen is optional). Examples are - papersize and font units. + paper size and font units. The -compiled.specifics part should be set in the PKGNAMESUFFIX variable. The version string should follow a dash (-) and be a period-separated list of integers and single lowercase alphabetics. In particular, it is not permissible to have another dash inside the version string. The only exception is the string pl (meaning patchlevel), which can be used only when there are no major and minor version numbers in the software. If the software version has strings like alpha, beta, rc, or pre, take the first letter and put it immediately after a period. If the version string continues after those names, the numbers should follow the single alphabet without an extra period between them. The idea is to make it easier to sort ports by looking at the version string. In particular, make sure version number components are always delimited by a period, and if the date is part of the string, use the yyyy.mm.dd format, not dd.mm.yyyy or the non-Y2K compliant yy.mm.dd format. Here are some (real) examples on how to convert the name as called by the software authors to a suitable package name: Distribution Name PKGNAMEPREFIX PORTNAME PKGNAMESUFFIX PORTVERSION Reason mule-2.2.2 (empty) mule (empty) 2.2.2 No changes required EmiClock-1.0.2 (empty) emiclock (empty) 1.0.2 No uppercase names for single programs rdist-1.3alpha (empty) rdist (empty) 1.3.a No strings like alpha allowed es-0.9-beta1 (empty) es (empty) 0.9.b1 No strings like beta allowed mailman-2.0rc3 (empty) mailman (empty) 2.0.r3 No strings like rc allowed v3.3beta021.src (empty) tiff (empty) 3.3 What the heck was that anyway? tvtwm (empty) tvtwm (empty) pl11 Version string always required piewm (empty) piewm (empty) 1.0 Version string always required xvgr-2.10pl1 (empty) xvgr (empty) 2.10.1 pl allowed only when no major/minor version numbers gawk-2.15.6 ja- gawk (empty) 2.15.6 Japanese language version psutils-1.13 (empty) psutils -letter 1.13 - Papersize hardcoded at package build time + Paper size hardcoded at package build time pkfonts (empty) pkfonts 300 1.0 Package for 300dpi fonts If there is absolutely no trace of version information in the original source and it is unlikely that the original author will ever release another version, just set the version string to 1.0 (like the piewm example above). Otherwise, ask the original author or use the date string (yyyy.mm.dd) as the version. Categorization <makevar>CATEGORIES</makevar> When a package is created, it is put under /usr/ports/packages/All and links are made from one or more subdirectories of /usr/ports/packages. The names of these subdirectories are specified by the variable CATEGORIES. It is intended to make life easier for the user when he is wading through the pile of packages on the FTP site or the CDROM. Please take a look at the current list of categories and pick the ones that are suitable for your port. This list also determines where in the ports tree the port is imported. If you put more than one category here, it is assumed that the port files will be put in the subdirectory with the name in the first category. See below for more discussion about how to pick the right categories. Current list of categories Here is the current list of port categories. Those marked with an asterisk (*) are virtual categories—those that do not have a corresponding subdirectory in the ports tree. They are only used as secondary categories, and only for search purposes. For non-virtual categories, you will find a one-line description in the COMMENT in that subdirectory's Makefile. Category Description Notes accessibility Ports to help disabled users. afterstep* Ports to support the AfterStep window manager. arabic Arabic language support. archivers Archiving tools. astro Astronomical ports. audio Sound support. benchmarks Benchmarking utilities. biology Biology-related software. cad Computer aided design tools. chinese Chinese language support. comms Communication software. Mostly software to talk to your serial port. converters Character code converters. databases Databases. deskutils Things that used to be on the desktop before computers were invented. devel Development utilities. Do not put libraries here just because they are libraries—unless they truly do not belong anywhere else, they should not be in this category. dns DNS-related software. docs* Meta-ports for FreeBSD documentation. editors General editors. Specialized editors go in the section for those tools (e.g., a mathematical-formula editor will go in math). elisp* Emacs-lisp ports. emulators Emulators for other operating systems. Terminal emulators do not belong here—X-based ones should go to x11 and text-based ones to either comms or misc, depending on the exact functionality. finance Monetary, financial and related applications. french French language support. ftp FTP client and server utilities. If your port speaks both FTP and HTTP, put it in ftp with a secondary category of www. games Games. geography* Geography-related software. german German language support. gnome* Ports from the GNOME Project. gnustep* Software related to the GNUstep desktop environment. graphics Graphics utilities. hamradio* Software for amateur radio. haskell* Software related to the Haskell language. hebrew Hebrew language support. hungarian Hungarian language support. ipv6* IPv6 related software. irc Internet Relay Chat utilities. japanese Japanese language support. java Software related to the Java™ language. The java category shall not be the only one for a port. Save for ports directly related to the Java language, porters are also encouraged not to use java as the main category of a port. kde* Ports from the K Desktop Environment (KDE) Project. kld* Kernel loadable modules. korean Korean language support. lang Programming languages. linux* Linux applications and support utilities. lisp* Software related to the Lisp language. mail Mail software. math Numerical computation software and other utilities for mathematics. mbone MBone applications. misc Miscellaneous utilities Basically things that do not belong anywhere else. If at all possible, try to find a better category for your port than misc, as ports tend to get overlooked in here. multimedia Multimedia software. net Miscellaneous networking software. net-im Instant messaging software. net-mgmt Networking management software. net-p2p Peer to peer network applications. news USENET news software. palm Software support for the Palm™ series. parallel* Applications dealing with parallelism in computing. pear* Ports related to the Pear PHP framework. perl5* Ports that require Perl version 5 to run. plan9* Various programs from Plan9. polish Polish language support. ports-mgmt Ports for managing, installing and developing FreeBSD ports and packages. portuguese Portuguese language support. print Printing software. Desktop publishing tools (previewers, etc.) belong here too. python* Software related to the Python language. ruby* Software related to the Ruby language. rubygems* Ports of RubyGems packages. russian Russian language support. scheme* Software related to the Scheme language. science Scientific ports that do not fit into other categories such as astro, biology and math. security Security utilities. shells Command line shells. spanish* Spanish language support. sysutils System utilities. tcl* Ports that use Tcl to run. textproc Text processing utilities. It does not include desktop publishing tools, which go to print. tk* Ports that use Tk to run. ukrainian Ukrainian language support. vietnamese Vietnamese language support. windowmaker* Ports to support the WindowMaker window manager. www Software related to the World Wide Web. HTML language support belongs here too. x11 The X Window System and friends. This category is only for software that directly supports the window system. Do not put regular X applications here; most of them should go into other x11-* categories (see below). If your port is an X application, define USE_XLIB (implied by USE_IMAKE) and put it in the appropriate category. x11-clocks X11 clocks. x11-drivers X11 drivers. x11-fm X11 file managers. x11-fonts X11 fonts and font utilities. x11-servers X11 servers. x11-themes X11 themes. x11-toolkits X11 toolkits. x11-wm X11 window managers. xfce* Ports related to the Xfce desktop environment. zope* Zope support. Choosing the right category As many of the categories overlap, you often have to choose which of the categories should be the primary category of your port. There are several rules that govern this issue. Here is the list of priorities, in decreasing order of precedence: The first category must be a physical category (see above). This is necessary to make the packaging work. Virtual categories and physical categories may be intermixed after that. Language specific categories always come first. For example, if your port installs Japanese X11 fonts, then your CATEGORIES line would read japanese x11-fonts. Specific categories are listed before less-specific ones. For instance, an HTML editor should be listed as www editors, not the other way around. Also, you should not list net when the port belongs to any of irc, mail, mbone, news, security, or www, as net is included implicitly. x11 is used as a secondary category only when the primary category is a natural language. In particular, you should not put x11 in the category line for X applications. Emacs modes should be placed in the same ports category as the application supported by the mode, not in editors. For example, an Emacs mode to edit source files of some programming language should go into lang. Ports which install loadable kernel modules should have the virtual category kld in their CATEGORIES line. misc should not appear with any other non-virtual category. If you have misc with something else in your CATEGORIES line, that means you can safely delete misc and just put the port in that other subdirectory! If your port truly does not belong anywhere else, put it in misc. If you are not sure about the category, please put a comment to that effect in your &man.send-pr.1; submission so we can discuss it before we import it. If you are a committer, send a note to the &a.ports; so we can discuss it first. Too often, new ports are imported to the wrong category only to be moved right away. This causes unnecessary and undesirable bloat in the master source repository. Proposing a new category As the Ports Collection has grown over time, various new categories have been introduced. New categories can either be virtual categories—those that do not have a corresponding subdirectory in the ports tree— or physical categories—those that do. The following text discusses the issues involved in creating a new physical category so that you can understand them before you propose one. Our existing practice has been to avoid creating a new physical category unless either a large number of ports would logically belong to it, or the ports that would belong to it are a logically distinct group that is of limited general interest (for instance, categories related to spoken human languages), or preferably both. The rationale for this is that such a change creates a fair amount of work for both the committers and also for all users who track changes to the Ports Collection. In addition, proposed category changes just naturally seem to attract controversy. (Perhaps this is because there is no clear consensus on when a category is too big, nor whether categories should lend themselves to browsing (and thus what number of categories would be an ideal number), and so forth.) Here is the procedure: Propose the new category on &a.ports;. You should include a detailed rationale for the new category, including why you feel the existing categories are not sufficient, and the list of existing ports proposed to move. (If there are new ports pending in GNATS that would fit this category, list them too.) If you are the maintainer and/or submitter, respectively, mention that as it may help you to make your case. Participate in the discussion. If it seems that there is support for your idea, file a PR which includes both the rationale and the list of existing ports that need to be moved. Ideally, this PR should also include patches for the following: Makefiles for the new ports once they are repocopied Makefile for the new category Makefile for the old ports' categories Makefiles for ports that depend on the old ports (for extra credit, you can include the other files that have to change, as per the procedure in the Committer's Guide.) Since it affects the ports infrastructure and involves not only performing repo-copies but also possibly running regression tests on the build cluster, the PR should be assigned to the &a.portmgr;. If that PR is approved, a committer will need to follow the rest of the procedure that is outlined in the Committer's Guide. Proposing a new virtual category should be similar to the above but much less involved, since no ports will actually have to move. In this case, the only patches to include in the PR would be those to add the new category to the CATEGORIES of the affected ports. Proposing reorganizing all the categories Occasionally someone proposes reorganizing the categories with either a 2-level structure, or some other kind of keyword structure. To date, nothing has come of any of these proposals because, while they are very easy to make, the effort involved to retrofit the entire existing ports collection with any kind of reorganization is daunting to say the very least. Please read the history of these proposals in the mailing list archives before you post this idea; furthermore, you should be prepared to be challenged to offer a working prototype. The distribution files The second part of the Makefile describes the files that must be downloaded in order to build the port, and where they can be downloaded from. <makevar>DISTVERSION/DISTNAME</makevar> DISTNAME is the name of the port as called by the authors of the software. DISTNAME defaults to ${PORTNAME}-${PORTVERSION}, so override it only if necessary. DISTNAME is only used in two places. First, the distribution file list (DISTFILES) defaults to ${DISTNAME}${EXTRACT_SUFX}. Second, the distribution file is expected to extract into a subdirectory named WRKSRC, which defaults to work/${DISTNAME}. Some vendor's distribution names which do not fit into the ${PORTNAME}-${PORTVERSION}-scheme can be handled automatically by setting DISTVERSION. PORTVERSION and DISTNAME will be derived automatically, but can of course be overridden. The following table lists some examples: DISTVERSION PORTVERSION 0.7.1d 0.7.1.d 10Alpha3 10.a3 3Beta7-pre2 3.b7.p2 8:f_17 8f.17 PKGNAMEPREFIX and PKGNAMESUFFIX do not affect DISTNAME. Also note that if WRKSRC is equal to work/${PORTNAME}-${PORTVERSION} while the original source archive is named something other than ${PORTNAME}-${PORTVERSION}${EXTRACT_SUFX}, you should probably leave DISTNAME alone— you are better off defining DISTFILES than having to set both DISTNAME and WRKSRC (and possibly EXTRACT_SUFX). <makevar>MASTER_SITES</makevar> Record the directory part of the FTP/HTTP-URL pointing at the original tarball in MASTER_SITES. Do not forget the trailing slash (/)! The make macros will try to use this specification for grabbing the distribution file with FETCH if they cannot find it already on the system. It is recommended that you put multiple sites on this list, preferably from different continents. This will safeguard against wide-area network problems. We are even planning to add support for automatically determining the closest master site and fetching from there; having multiple sites will go a long way towards helping this effort. If the original tarball is part of one of the popular archives such as X-contrib, GNU, or Perl CPAN, you may be able refer to those sites in an easy compact form using MASTER_SITE_* (e.g., MASTER_SITE_XCONTRIB, MASTER_SITE_GNU and MASTER_SITE_PERL_CPAN). Simply set MASTER_SITES to one of these variables and MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR to the path within the archive. Here is an example: MASTER_SITES= ${MASTER_SITE_XCONTRIB} MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR= applications These variables are defined in /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.sites.mk. There are new entries added all the time, so make sure to check the latest version of this file before submitting a port. The user can also set the MASTER_SITE_* variables in /etc/make.conf to override our choices, and use their favorite mirrors of these popular archives instead. <makevar>EXTRACT_SUFX</makevar> If you have one distribution file, and it uses an odd suffix to indicate the compression mechanism, set EXTRACT_SUFX. For example, if the distribution file was named foo.tgz instead of the more normal foo.tar.gz, you would write: DISTNAME= foo EXTRACT_SUFX= .tgz The USE_BZIP2 and USE_ZIP variables automatically set EXTRACT_SUFX to .tar.bz2 or .zip as necessary. If neither of these are set then EXTRACT_SUFX defaults to .tar.gz. You never need to set both EXTRACT_SUFX and DISTFILES. <makevar>DISTFILES</makevar> Sometimes the names of the files to be downloaded have no resemblance to the name of the port. For example, it might be called source.tar.gz or similar. In other cases the application's source code might be in several different archives, all of which must be downloaded. If this is the case, set DISTFILES to be a space separated list of all the files that must be downloaded. DISTFILES= source1.tar.gz source2.tar.gz If not explicitly set, DISTFILES defaults to ${DISTNAME}${EXTRACT_SUFX}. <makevar>EXTRACT_ONLY</makevar> If only some of the DISTFILES must be extracted—for example, one of them is the source code, while another is an uncompressed document—list the filenames that must be extracted in EXTRACT_ONLY. DISTFILES= source.tar.gz manual.html EXTRACT_ONLY= source.tar.gz If none of the DISTFILES should be uncompressed then set EXTRACT_ONLY to the empty string. EXTRACT_ONLY= <makevar>PATCHFILES</makevar> If your port requires some additional patches that are available by FTP or HTTP, set PATCHFILES to the names of the files and PATCH_SITES to the URL of the directory that contains them (the format is the same as MASTER_SITES). If the patch is not relative to the top of the source tree (i.e., WRKSRC) because it contains some extra pathnames, set PATCH_DIST_STRIP accordingly. For instance, if all the pathnames in the patch have an extra foozolix-1.0/ in front of the filenames, then set PATCH_DIST_STRIP=-p1. Do not worry if the patches are compressed; they will be decompressed automatically if the filenames end with .gz or .Z. If the patch is distributed with some other files, such as documentation, in a gzip'd tarball, you cannot just use PATCHFILES. If that is the case, add the name and the location of the patch tarball to DISTFILES and MASTER_SITES. Then, use the EXTRA_PATCHES variable to point to those files and bsd.port.mk will automatically apply them for you. In particular, do not copy patch files into the PATCHDIR directory—that directory may not be writable. The tarball will have been extracted alongside the regular source by then, so there is no need to explicitly extract it if it is a regular gzip'd or compress'd tarball. If you do the latter, take extra care not to overwrite something that already exists in that directory. Also, do not forget to add a command to remove the copied patch in the pre-clean target. Multiple distribution files or patches from different sites and subdirectories (<literal>MASTER_SITES:n</literal>) (Consider this to be a somewhat advanced topic; those new to this document may wish to skip this section at first). This section has information on the fetching mechanism known as both MASTER_SITES:n and MASTER_SITES_NN. We will refer to this mechanism as MASTER_SITES:n hereon. A little background first. OpenBSD has a neat feature inside the DISTFILES and PATCHFILES variables which allows files and patches to be postfixed with :n identifiers. Here, n can be both [0-9] and denote a group designation. For example: DISTFILES= alpha:0 beta:1 In OpenBSD, distribution file alpha will be associated with variable MASTER_SITES0 instead of our common MASTER_SITES and beta with MASTER_SITES1. This is a very interesting feature which can decrease that endless search for the correct download site. Just picture 2 files in DISTFILES and 20 sites in MASTER_SITES, the sites slow as hell where beta is carried by all sites in MASTER_SITES, and alpha can only be found in the 20th site. It would be such a waste to check all of them if the maintainer knew this beforehand, would it not? Not a good start for that lovely weekend! Now that you have the idea, just imagine more DISTFILES and more MASTER_SITES. Surely our distfiles survey meister would appreciate the relief to network strain that this would bring. In the next sections, information will follow on the FreeBSD implementation of this idea. We improved a bit on OpenBSD's concept. Simplified information This section tells you how to quickly prepare fine grained fetching of multiple distribution files and patches from different sites and subdirectories. We describe here a case of simplified MASTER_SITES:n usage. This will be sufficient for most scenarios. However, if you need further information, you will have to refer to the next section. Some applications consist of multiple distribution files that must be downloaded from a number of different sites. For example, Ghostscript consists of the core of the program, and then a large number of driver files that are used depending on the user's printer. Some of these driver files are supplied with the core, but many others must be downloaded from a variety of different sites. To support this, each entry in DISTFILES may be followed by a colon and a tag name. Each site listed in MASTER_SITES is then followed by a colon, and the tag that indicates which distribution files should be downloaded from this site. For example, consider an application with the source split in two parts, source1.tar.gz and source2.tar.gz, which must be downloaded from two different sites. The port's Makefile would include lines like . Simplified use of <literal>MASTER_SITES:n</literal> with 1 file per site MASTER_SITES= ftp://ftp.example1.com/:source1 \ ftp://ftp.example2.com/:source2 DISTFILES= source1.tar.gz:source1 \ source2.tar.gz:source2 Multiple distribution files can have the same tag. Continuing the previous example, suppose that there was a third distfile, source3.tar.gz, that should be downloaded from ftp.example2.com. The Makefile would then be written like . Simplified use of <literal>MASTER_SITES:n</literal> with more than 1 file per site MASTER_SITES= ftp://ftp.example1.com/:source1 \ ftp://ftp.example2.com/:source2 DISTFILES= source1.tar.gz:source1 \ source2.tar.gz:source2 \ source3.tar.gz:source2 Detailed information Okay, so the previous section example did not reflect your needs? In this section we will explain in detail how the fine grained fetching mechanism MASTER_SITES:n works and how you can modify your ports to use it. Elements can be postfixed with :n where n is [^:,]+, i.e., n could conceptually be any alphanumeric string but we will limit it to [a-zA-Z_][0-9a-zA-Z_]+ for now. Moreover, string matching is case sensitive; i.e., n is different from N. However, the following words cannot be used for postfixing purposes since they yield special meaning: default, all and ALL (they are used internally in item ). Furthermore, DEFAULT is a special purpose word (check item ). Elements postfixed with :n belong to the group n, :m belong to group m and so forth. Elements without a postfix are groupless, i.e., they all belong to the special group DEFAULT. If you postfix any elements with DEFAULT, you are just being redundant unless you want to have an element belonging to both DEFAULT and other groups at the same time (check item ). The following examples are equivalent but the first one is preferred: MASTER_SITES= alpha MASTER_SITES= alpha:DEFAULT Groups are not exclusive, an element may belong to several different groups at the same time and a group can either have either several different elements or none at all. Repeated elements within the same group will be simply that, repeated elements. When you want an element to belong to several groups at the same time, you can use the comma operator (,). Instead of repeating it several times, each time with a different postfix, we can list several groups at once in a single postfix. For instance, :m,n,o marks an element that belongs to group m, n and o. All the following examples are equivalent but the last one is preferred: MASTER_SITES= alpha alpha:SOME_SITE MASTER_SITES= alpha:DEFAULT alpha:SOME_SITE MASTER_SITES= alpha:SOME_SITE,DEFAULT MASTER_SITES= alpha:DEFAULT,SOME_SITE All sites within a given group are sorted according to MASTER_SORT_AWK. All groups within MASTER_SITES and PATCH_SITES are sorted as well. Group semantics can be used in any of the following variables MASTER_SITES, PATCH_SITES, MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR, PATCH_SITE_SUBDIR, DISTFILES, and PATCHFILES according to the following syntax: All MASTER_SITES, PATCH_SITES, MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR and PATCH_SITE_SUBDIR elements must be terminated with the forward slash / character. If any elements belong to any groups, the group postfix :n must come right after the terminator /. The MASTER_SITES:n mechanism relies on the existence of the terminator / to avoid confusing elements where a :n is a valid part of the element with occurrences where :n denotes group n. For compatibility purposes, since the / terminator was not required before in both MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR and PATCH_SITE_SUBDIR elements, if the postfix immediate preceding character is not a / then :n will be considered a valid part of the element instead of a group postfix even if an element is postfixed with :n. See both and . Detailed use of <literal>MASTER_SITES:n</literal> in <makevar>MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR</makevar> MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR= old:n new/:NEW Directories within group DEFAULT -> old:n Directories within group NEW -> new Detailed use of <literal>MASTER_SITES:n</literal> with comma operator, multiple files, multiple sites and multiple subdirectories MASTER_SITES= http://site1/%SUBDIR%/ http://site2/:DEFAULT \ http://site3/:group3 http://site4/:group4 \ http://site5/:group5 http://site6/:group6 \ http://site7/:DEFAULT,group6 \ http://site8/%SUBDIR%/:group6,group7 \ http://site9/:group8 DISTFILES= file1 file2:DEFAULT file3:group3 \ file4:group4,group5,group6 file5:grouping \ file6:group7 MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR= directory-trial:1 directory-n/:groupn \ directory-one/:group6,DEFAULT \ directory The previous example results in the following fine grained fetching. Sites are listed in the exact order they will be used. file1 will be fetched from MASTER_SITE_OVERRIDE http://site1/directory-trial:1/ http://site1/directory-one/ http://site1/directory/ http://site2/ http://site7/ MASTER_SITE_BACKUP file2 will be fetched exactly as file1 since they both belong to the same group MASTER_SITE_OVERRIDE http://site1/directory-trial:1/ http://site1/directory-one/ http://site1/directory/ http://site2/ http://site7/ MASTER_SITE_BACKUP file3 will be fetched from MASTER_SITE_OVERRIDE http://site3/ MASTER_SITE_BACKUP file4 will be fetched from MASTER_SITE_OVERRIDE http://site4/ http://site5/ http://site6/ http://site7/ http://site8/directory-one/ MASTER_SITE_BACKUP file5 will be fetched from MASTER_SITE_OVERRIDE MASTER_SITE_BACKUP file6 will be fetched from MASTER_SITE_OVERRIDE http://site8/ MASTER_SITE_BACKUP How do I group one of the special variables from bsd.sites.mk, e.g., MASTER_SITE_SOURCEFORGE? See . Detailed use of <literal>MASTER_SITES:n</literal> with <makevar>MASTER_SITE_SOURCEFORGE</makevar> MASTER_SITES= http://site1/ ${MASTER_SITE_SOURCEFORGE:S/$/:sourceforge,TEST/} DISTFILES= something.tar.gz:sourceforge something.tar.gz will be fetched from all sites within MASTER_SITE_SOURCEFORGE. How do I use this with PATCH* variables? All examples were done with MASTER* variables but they work exactly the same for PATCH* ones as can be seen in . Simplified use of <literal>MASTER_SITES:n</literal> with <makevar>PATCH_SITES</makevar>. PATCH_SITES= http://site1/ http://site2/:test PATCHFILES= patch1:test What does change for ports? What does not? All current ports remain the same. The MASTER_SITES:n feature code is only activated if there are elements postfixed with :n like elements according to the aforementioned syntax rules, especially as shown in item . The port targets remain the same: checksum, makesum, patch, configure, build, etc. With the obvious exceptions of do-fetch, fetch-list, master-sites and patch-sites. do-fetch: deploys the new grouping postfixed DISTFILES and PATCHFILES with their matching group elements within both MASTER_SITES and PATCH_SITES which use matching group elements within both MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR and PATCH_SITE_SUBDIR. Check . fetch-list: works like old fetch-list with the exception that it groups just like do-fetch. master-sites and patch-sites: (incompatible with older versions) only return the elements of group DEFAULT; in fact, they execute targets master-sites-default and patch-sites-default respectively. Furthermore, using target either master-sites-all or patch-sites-all is preferred to directly checking either MASTER_SITES or PATCH_SITES. Also, directly checking is not guaranteed to work in any future versions. Check item for more information on these new port targets. New port targets There are master-sites-n and patch-sites-n targets which will list the elements of the respective group n within MASTER_SITES and PATCH_SITES respectively. For instance, both master-sites-DEFAULT and patch-sites-DEFAULT will return the elements of group DEFAULT, master-sites-test and patch-sites-test of group test, and thereon. There are new targets master-sites-all and patch-sites-all which do the work of the old master-sites and patch-sites ones. They return the elements of all groups as if they all belonged to the same group with the caveat that it lists as many MASTER_SITE_BACKUP and MASTER_SITE_OVERRIDE as there are groups defined within either DISTFILES or PATCHFILES; respectively for master-sites-all and patch-sites-all. <makevar>DIST_SUBDIR</makevar> Do not let your port clutter /usr/ports/distfiles. If your port requires a lot of files to be fetched, or contains a file that has a name that might conflict with other ports (e.g., Makefile), set DIST_SUBDIR to the name of the port (${PORTNAME} or ${PKGNAMEPREFIX}${PORTNAME} should work fine). This will change DISTDIR from the default /usr/ports/distfiles to /usr/ports/distfiles/DIST_SUBDIR, and in effect puts everything that is required for your port into that subdirectory. It will also look at the subdirectory with the same name on the backup master site at ftp.FreeBSD.org. (Setting DISTDIR explicitly in your Makefile will not accomplish this, so please use DIST_SUBDIR.) This does not affect the MASTER_SITES you define in your Makefile. <makevar>ALWAYS_KEEP_DISTFILES</makevar> If your port uses binary distfiles and has a license that requires that the source code is provided with packages distributed in binary form, e.g. GPL, ALWAYS_KEEP_DISTFILES will instruct the &os; build cluster to keep a copy of the files specified in DISTFILES. Users of these ports will generally not need these files, so it is a good idea to only add the source distfiles to DISTFILES when PACKAGE_BUILDING is defined. Use of <makevar>ALWAYS_KEEP_DISTFILES</makevar>. .if defined(PACKAGE_BUILDING) DISTFILES+= foo.tar.gz ALWAYS_KEEP_DISTFILES= yes .endif When adding extra files to DISTFILES, make sure you also add them to distinfo. Also, the additional files will normally be extracted into WRKDIR as well, which for some ports may - lead to undesirable sideeffects and require special handling. + lead to undesirable side effects and require special handling. <makevar>MAINTAINER</makevar> Set your mail-address here. Please. :-) Note that only a single address without the comment part is allowed as a MAINTAINER value. The format used should be user@hostname.domain. Please do not include any descriptive text such as your real name in this entry—that merely confuses bsd.port.mk. The maintainer is responsible for keeping the port up to date, and ensuring the port works correctly. For a detailed description of the responsibilities of a port maintainer, refer to the The challenge for port maintainers section. Changes to the port will be sent to the maintainer of a port for review and approval before being committed. If the maintainer does not respond to an update request after two weeks (excluding major public holidays), then that is considered a maintainer timeout, and the update may be made without explicit maintainer approval. If the maintainer does not respond within three months, then that maintainer is considered absent without leave, and can be replaced as the maintainer of the particular port in question. Exceptions to this are anything maintained by the &a.portmgr;, or the &a.security-officer;. No unauthorized commits may ever be made to ports maintained by those groups. We reserve the right to modify the maintainer's submission to better match existing policies and style of the Ports Collection without explicit blessing from the submitter. Also, large infrastructural changes can result in a port being modified without the maintainer's consent. These kinds of changes will never affect the port's functionality. The &a.portmgr; reserves the right to revoke or override anyone's maintainership for any reason, and the &a.security-officer; reserves the right to revoke or override maintainership for security reasons. <makevar>COMMENT</makevar> This is a one-line description of the port. Please do not include the package name (or version number of the software) in the comment. The comment should begin with a capital and end without a period. Here is an example: COMMENT= A cat chasing a mouse all over the screen The COMMENT variable should immediately follow the MAINTAINER variable in the Makefile. Please try to keep the COMMENT line less than 70 characters, as it is displayed to users as a one-line summary of the port. Dependencies Many ports depend on other ports. This is very convenient and nice feature of most Unix-like operating systems, including &os;. It allows not having to bundle common dependencies with every port or package, since a lot of ports would share them. There are seven variables that can be used to ensure that all the required bits will be on the user's machine. There are also some pre-supported dependency variables for common cases, plus a few more to control the behavior of dependencies. <makevar>LIB_DEPENDS</makevar> This variable specifies the shared libraries this port depends on. It is a list of lib:dir:target tuples where lib is the name of the shared library, dir is the directory in which to find it in case it is not available, and target is the target to call in that directory. For example, LIB_DEPENDS= jpeg.9:${PORTSDIR}/graphics/jpeg will check for a shared jpeg library with major version 9, and descend into the graphics/jpeg subdirectory of your ports tree to build and install it if it is not found. The target part can be omitted if it is equal to DEPENDS_TARGET (which defaults to install). The lib part is a regular expression which is being looked up in the ldconfig -r output. Values such as intl.[5-7] and intl are allowed. The first pattern, intl.[5-7], will match any of: intl.5, intl.6 or intl.7. The second pattern, intl, will match any version of the intl library. The dependency is checked twice, once from within the extract target and then from within the install target. Also, the name of the dependency is put into the package so that &man.pkg.add.1; will automatically install it if it is not on the user's system. <makevar>RUN_DEPENDS</makevar> This variable specifies executables or files this port depends on during run-time. It is a list of path:dir:target tuples where path is the name of the executable or file, dir is the directory in which to find it in case it is not available, and target is the target to call in that directory. If path starts with a slash (/), it is treated as a file and its existence is tested with test -e; otherwise, it is assumed to be an executable, and which -s is used to determine if the program exists in the search path. For example, RUN_DEPENDS= ${LOCALBASE}/etc/innd:${PORTSDIR}/news/inn \ xmlcatmgr:${PORTSDIR}/textproc/xmlcatmgr will check if the file or directory /usr/local/etc/innd exists, and build and install it from the news/inn subdirectory of the ports tree if it is not found. It will also see if an executable called xmlcatmgr is in the search path, and descend into the textproc/xmlcatmgr subdirectory of your ports tree to build and install it if it is not found. In this case, innd is actually an executable; if an executable is in a place that is not expected to be in the search path, you should use the full pathname. The official search PATH used on the ports build cluster is /sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin The dependency is checked from within the install target. Also, the name of the dependency is put into the package so that &man.pkg.add.1; will automatically install it if it is not on the user's system. The target part can be omitted if it is the same as DEPENDS_TARGET. Quite common situation is when RUN_DEPENDS is literally the same as BUILD_DEPENDS, especially if ported software is written in a scripted language or if it requires the same run-time environment used to build it. In this case, it is very tempting, and indeed natural to directly assign one to another: RUN_DEPENDS= ${BUILD_DEPENDS} However, doing so can and often will result in run-time dependencies be polluted by superfluous entries, not present in original port's BUILD_DEPENDS. It happens due to the fact that &man.make.1 is being lazy when it evaluates assignments like these. Most probably additional dependencies will be pulled by ports/Mk/bsd.*.mk when processing USE_* variables, which most ports contain. For example, such direct assignment along with USE_GMAKE=yes will bring gmake into RUN_DEPENDS, despite that it was not included explicitly in BUILD_DEPENDS. To prevent this from happening, immediate expansion assignment should be used, i.e. expand the value before assigning it to the variable: RUN_DEPENDS:= ${BUILD_DEPENDS} <makevar>BUILD_DEPENDS</makevar> This variable specifies executables or files this port requires to build. Like RUN_DEPENDS, it is a list of path:dir:target tuples. For example, BUILD_DEPENDS= unzip:${PORTSDIR}/archivers/unzip will check for an executable called unzip, and descend into the archivers/unzip subdirectory of your ports tree to build and install it if it is not found. build here means everything from extraction to compilation. The dependency is checked from within the extract target. The target part can be omitted if it is the same as DEPENDS_TARGET <makevar>FETCH_DEPENDS</makevar> This variable specifies executables or files this port requires to fetch. Like the previous two, it is a list of path:dir:target tuples. For example, FETCH_DEPENDS= ncftp2:${PORTSDIR}/net/ncftp2 will check for an executable called ncftp2, and descend into the net/ncftp2 subdirectory of your ports tree to build and install it if it is not found. The dependency is checked from within the fetch target. The target part can be omitted if it is the same as DEPENDS_TARGET. <makevar>EXTRACT_DEPENDS</makevar> This variable specifies executables or files this port requires for extraction. Like the previous, it is a list of path:dir:target tuples. For example, EXTRACT_DEPENDS= unzip:${PORTSDIR}/archivers/unzip will check for an executable called unzip, and descend into the archivers/unzip subdirectory of your ports tree to build and install it if it is not found. The dependency is checked from within the extract target. The target part can be omitted if it is the same as DEPENDS_TARGET. Use this variable only if the extraction does not already work (the default assumes gzip) and cannot be made to work using USE_ZIP or USE_BZIP2 described in . <makevar>PATCH_DEPENDS</makevar> This variable specifies executables or files this port requires to patch. Like the previous, it is a list of path:dir:target tuples. For example, PATCH_DEPENDS= ${NONEXISTENT}:${PORTSDIR}/java/jfc:extract will descend into the java/jfc subdirectory of your ports tree to extract it. The dependency is checked from within the patch target. The target part can be omitted if it is the same as DEPENDS_TARGET. <makevar>USE_<replaceable>*</replaceable></makevar> A number of variables exist in order to encapsulate common dependencies that many ports have. Although their use is optional, they can help to reduce the verbosity of the port Makefiles. Each of them is styled as USE_*. The usage of these variables is restricted to the port Makefiles and ports/Mk/bsd.*.mk and is not designed to encapsulate user-settable options — use WITH_* and WITHOUT_* for that purpose. It is always incorrect to set any USE_* in /etc/make.conf. For instance, setting USE_GCC=3.4 would add a dependency on gcc34 for every port, including gcc34 itself! The <makevar>USE_<replaceable>*</replaceable></makevar> variables Variable Means USE_BZIP2 The port's tarballs are compressed with bzip2. USE_ZIP The port's tarballs are compressed with zip. USE_BISON The port uses bison for building. USE_CDRTOOLS The port requires cdrecord either from sysutils/cdrtools or sysutils/cdrtools-cjk, according to the user's preference. USE_GCC The port requires a specific version of gcc to build. The exact version can be specified with value such as 3.4. The minimal required version can be specified as 3.4+. The gcc from the base system is used when it satisfies the requested version, otherwise an appropriate gcc is compiled from ports and the CC and CXX variables are adjusted.
Variables related to gmake and the configure script are described in , while autoconf, automake and libtool are described in . Perl related variables are described in . X11 variables are listed in . deals with GNOME and with KDE related variables. documents Java variables, while contains information on Apache, PHP and PEAR modules. Python is discussed in , while Ruby in . provides variables used for SDL applications and finally, contains information on Xfce. Minimal version of a dependency A minimal version of a dependency can be specified in any *_DEPENDS variable except LIB_DEPENDS using the following syntax: p5-Spiffy>=0.26:${PORTSDIR}/devel/p5-Spiffy The first field contains a dependent package name, which must match the entry in the package database, a comparison sign, and a package version. The dependency is satisfied if p5-Spiffy-0.26 or newer is installed on the machine. Notes on dependencies As mentioned above, the default target to call when a dependency is required is DEPENDS_TARGET. It defaults to install. This is a user variable; it is never defined in a port's Makefile. If your port needs a special way to handle a dependency, use the :target part of the *_DEPENDS variables instead of redefining DEPENDS_TARGET. When you type make clean, its dependencies are automatically cleaned too. If you do not wish this to happen, define the variable NOCLEANDEPENDS in your environment. This may be particularly desirable if the port has something that takes a long time to rebuild in its dependency list, such as KDE, GNOME or Mozilla. To depend on another port unconditionally, use the variable ${NONEXISTENT} as the first field of BUILD_DEPENDS or RUN_DEPENDS. Use this only when you need to get the source of the other port. You can often save compilation time by specifying the target too. For instance BUILD_DEPENDS= ${NONEXISTENT}:${PORTSDIR}/graphics/jpeg:extract will always descend to the jpeg port and extract it. Circular dependencies are fatal Do not introduce any circular dependencies into the ports tree! The ports building technology does not tolerate circular dependencies. If you introduce one, you will have someone, somewhere in the world, whose FreeBSD installation will break almost immediately, with many others quickly to follow. These can really be hard to detect; if in doubt, before you make that change, make sure you have done the following: cd /usr/ports; make index. That process can be quite slow on older machines, but you may be able to save a large number of people—including yourself— a lot of grief in the process. <makevar>MASTERDIR</makevar> If your port needs to build slightly different versions of packages by having a variable (for instance, resolution, or paper size) take different values, create one subdirectory per package to make it easier for users to see what to do, but try to share as many files as possible between ports. Typically you only need a very short Makefile in all but one of the directories if you use variables cleverly. In the sole Makefile, you can use MASTERDIR to specify the directory where the rest of the files are. Also, use a variable as part of PKGNAMESUFFIX so the packages will have different names. This will be best demonstrated by an example. This is part of japanese/xdvi300/Makefile; PORTNAME= xdvi PORTVERSION= 17 PKGNAMEPREFIX= ja- PKGNAMESUFFIX= ${RESOLUTION} : # default RESOLUTION?= 300 .if ${RESOLUTION} != 118 && ${RESOLUTION} != 240 && \ ${RESOLUTION} != 300 && ${RESOLUTION} != 400 @${ECHO_MSG} "Error: invalid value for RESOLUTION: \"${RESOLUTION}\"" @${ECHO_MSG} "Possible values are: 118, 240, 300 (default) and 400." @${FALSE} .endif japanese/xdvi300 also has all the regular patches, package files, etc. If you type make there, it will take the default value for the resolution (300) and build the port normally. As for other resolutions, this is the entire xdvi118/Makefile: RESOLUTION= 118 MASTERDIR= ${.CURDIR}/../xdvi300 .include "${MASTERDIR}/Makefile" (xdvi240/Makefile and xdvi400/Makefile are similar). The MASTERDIR definition tells bsd.port.mk that the regular set of subdirectories like FILESDIR and SCRIPTDIR are to be found under xdvi300. The RESOLUTION=118 line will override the RESOLUTION=300 line in xdvi300/Makefile and the port will be built with resolution set to 118. Manpages The MAN[1-9LN] variables will automatically add any manpages to pkg-plist (this means you must not list manpages in the pkg-plist—see generating PLIST for more). It also makes the install stage automatically compress or uncompress manpages depending on the setting of NO_MANCOMPRESS in /etc/make.conf. If your port tries to install multiple names for manpages using symlinks or hardlinks, you must use the MLINKS variable to identify these. The link installed by your port will be destroyed and recreated by bsd.port.mk to make sure it points to the correct file. Any manpages listed in MLINKS must not be listed in the pkg-plist. To specify whether the manpages are compressed upon installation, use the MANCOMPRESSED variable. This variable can take three values, yes, no and maybe. yes means manpages are already installed compressed, no means they are not, and maybe means the software already respects the value of NO_MANCOMPRESS so bsd.port.mk does not have to do anything special. MANCOMPRESSED is automatically set to yes if USE_IMAKE is set and NO_INSTALL_MANPAGES is not set, and to no otherwise. You do not have to explicitly define it unless the default is not suitable for your port. If your port anchors its man tree somewhere other than MANPREFIX, you can use the MANPREFIX to set it. Also, if only manpages in certain sections go in a non-standard place, such as some perl modules ports, you can set individual man paths using MANsectPREFIX (where sect is one of 1-9, L or N). If your manpages go to language-specific subdirectories, set the name of the languages to MANLANG. The value of this variable defaults to "" (i.e., English only). Here is an example that puts it all together. MAN1= foo.1 MAN3= bar.3 MAN4= baz.4 MLINKS= foo.1 alt-name.8 MANLANG= "" ja MAN3PREFIX= ${PREFIX}/share/foobar MANCOMPRESSED= yes This states that six files are installed by this port; ${MANPREFIX}/man/man1/foo.1.gz ${MANPREFIX}/man/ja/man1/foo.1.gz ${PREFIX}/share/foobar/man/man3/bar.3.gz ${PREFIX}/share/foobar/man/ja/man3/bar.3.gz ${MANPREFIX}/man/man4/baz.4.gz ${MANPREFIX}/man/ja/man4/baz.4.gz Additionally ${MANPREFIX}/man/man8/alt-name.8.gz may or may not be installed by your port. Regardless, a symlink will be made to join the foo(1) manpage and alt-name(8) manpage. If only some manpages are translated, you can use several variables dynamically created from MANLANG content: MANLANG= "" de ja MAN1= foo.1 MAN1_EN= bar.1 MAN3_DE= baz.3 This translates into this list of files: ${MANPREFIX}/man/man1/foo.1.gz ${MANPREFIX}/man/de/man1/foo.1.gz ${MANPREFIX}/man/ja/man1/foo.1.gz ${MANPREFIX}/man/man1/bar.1.gz ${MANPREFIX}/man/de/man3/baz.3.gz Info files If your package needs to install GNU info files, they should be listed in the INFO variable (without the trailing .info), one entry per document. These files are assumed to be installed to PREFIX/INFO_PATH. You can change INFO_PATH if your package uses a different location. However, this is not recommended. These entries contain just the path relative to PREFIX/INFO_PATH. For example, lang/gcc34 installs info files to PREFIX/INFO_PATH/gcc34, and INFO will be something like this: INFO= gcc34/cpp gcc34/cppinternals gcc34/g77 ... Appropriate installation/de-installation code will be automatically added to the temporary pkg-plist before package registration. Makefile Options Some large applications can be built in a number of configurations, adding functionality if one of a number of libraries or applications is available. Examples include choice of natural (human) language, GUI versus command-line, or type of database to support. Since not all users want those libraries or applications, the ports system provides hooks that the port author can use to control which configuration should be built. Supporting these properly will make users happy, and effectively provide 2 or more ports for the price of one. Knobs <makevar>WITH_<replaceable>*</replaceable></makevar> and <makevar>WITHOUT_<replaceable>*</replaceable></makevar> These variables are designed to be set by the system administrator. There are many that are standardized in ports/KNOBS file. When creating a port, do not make knob names specific to a given application. For example in Avahi port, use WITHOUT_MDNS instead of WITHOUT_AVAHI_MDNS. You should not assume that a WITH_* necessarily has a corresponding WITHOUT_* variable and vice versa. In general, the default is simply assumed. Unless otherwise specified, these variables are only tested for being set or not set, rather than being set to some kind of variable such as YES or NO. Common <makevar>WITH_<replaceable>*</replaceable></makevar> and <makevar>WITHOUT_<replaceable>*</replaceable></makevar> variables Variable Means WITHOUT_NLS If set, says that internationalization is not needed, which can save compile time. By default, internationalization is used. WITH_OPENSSL_BASE Use the version of OpenSSL in the base system. WITH_OPENSSL_PORT Installs the version of OpenSSL from security/openssl, even if the base is up to date. WITHOUT_X11 If the port can be built both with and without X support, then it should normally be built with X support. If this variable is defined, then the version that does not have X support should be built instead.
Knob naming It is recommended that porters use like-named knobs, for the benefit of end-users and to help keep the number of knob names down. A list of popular knob names can be found in the KNOBS file. Knob names should reflect what the knob is and does. When a port has a lib-prefix in the PORTNAME the lib-prefix should be dropped in knob naming. <makevar>OPTIONS</makevar> Background The OPTIONS variable gives the user who installs the port a dialog with the available options and saves them to /var/db/ports/portname/options. Next time when the port has to be rebuild, the options are reused. Never again you will have to remember all the twenty WITH_* and WITHOUT_* options you used to build this port! When the user runs make config (or runs make build for the first time), the framework will check for /var/db/ports/portname/options. If that file does not exist, it will use the values of - OPTIONS to create a dialogbox where the options + OPTIONS to create a dialog box where the options can be enabled or disabled. Then the options file is saved and the selected variables will be used when building the port. If a new version of the port adds new OPTIONS, the dialog will be presented to the user, with the saved values of old OPTIONS prefilled. Use make showconfig to see the saved configuration. Use make rmconfig to remove the saved configuration. Syntax The syntax for the OPTIONS variable is: OPTIONS= OPTION "descriptive text" default ... The value for default is either ON or OFF. Multiple repetitions of these three fields are allowed. OPTIONS definition must appear before the inclusion of bsd.port.options.mk. The WITH_* and WITHOUT_* variables can only be tested after the inclusion of bsd.port.options.mk. Inclusion of bsd.port.pre.mk can be used instead, too, and is still widely used in ports written before the introduction of bsd.port.options.mk. But be aware that some variables will not work as expected after the inclusion of bsd.port.pre.mk, typically USE_* flags. Simple use of <makevar>OPTIONS</makevar> OPTIONS= FOO "Enable option foo" On \ BAR "Support feature bar" Off .include <bsd.port.options.mk> .if defined(WITHOUT_FOO) CONFIGURE_ARGS+= --without-foo .else CONFIGURE_ARGS+= --with-foo .endif .if defined(WITH_BAR) RUN_DEPENDS+= bar:${PORTSDIR}/bar/bar .endif .include <bsd.port.mk> Old style use of <makevar>OPTIONS</makevar> OPTIONS= FOO "Enable option foo" On .include <bsd.port.pre.mk> .if defined(WITHOUT_FOO) CONFIGURE_ARGS+= --without-foo .else CONFIGURE_ARGS+= --with-foo .endif .include <bsd.port.post.mk> Feature auto-activation When using a GNU configure script, keep an eye on which optional features are activated by auto-detection. Explicitly disable optional features you do not wish to be used by passing respective --without-xxx or --disable-xxx in CONFIGURE_ARGS. Wrong handling of an option .if defined(WITH_FOO) LIB_DEPENDS+= foo.0:${PORTSDIR}/devel/foo CONFIGURE_ARGS+= --enable-foo .endif In the example above, imagine a library libfoo is installed on the system. User does not want this application to use libfoo, so he toggled the option off in the make config dialog. But the application's configure script detects the library present in the system and includes its support in the resulting executable. Now when user decides to remove libfoo from the system, the ports system does not protest (no dependency on libfoo was recorded) but the application breaks. Correct handling of an option .if defined(WITH_FOO) LIB_DEPENDS+= foo.0:${PORTSDIR}/devel/foo CONFIGURE_ARGS+= --enable-foo .else CONFIGURE_ARGS+= --disable-foo .endif In the second example, the library libfoo is explicitly disabled. The configure script does not enable related features in the application, despite library's presence in the system. Specifying the working directory Each port is extracted in to a working directory, which must be writable. The ports system defaults to having the DISTFILES unpack in to a directory called ${DISTNAME}. In other words, if you have set: PORTNAME= foo PORTVERSION= 1.0 then the port's distribution files contain a top-level directory, foo-1.0, and the rest of the files are located under that directory. There are a number of variables you can override if that is not the case. <makevar>WRKSRC</makevar> The variable lists the name of the directory that is created when the application's distfiles are extracted. If our previous example extracted into a directory called foo (and not foo-1.0) you would write: WRKSRC= ${WRKDIR}/foo or possibly WRKSRC= ${WRKDIR}/${PORTNAME} <makevar>NO_WRKSUBDIR</makevar> If the port does not extract in to a subdirectory at all then you should set NO_WRKSUBDIR to indicate that. NO_WRKSUBDIR= yes <makevar>CONFLICTS</makevar> If your package cannot coexist with other packages (because of file conflicts, runtime incompatibility, etc.), list the other package names in the CONFLICTS variable. You can use shell globs like * and ? here. Packages names should be enumerated the same way they appear in /var/db/pkg. Please make sure that CONFLICTS does not match this port's package itself, or else forcing its installation with FORCE_PKG_REGISTER will no longer work. CONFLICTS automatically sets IGNORE, which is more fully documented in . When removing one of several conflicting ports, it is advisable to retain the CONFLICTS entries in those other ports for a few months to cater for users who only update once in a while. Installing files INSTALL_* macros Do use the macros provided in bsd.port.mk to ensure correct modes and ownership of files in your own *-install targets. INSTALL_PROGRAM is a command to install binary executables. INSTALL_SCRIPT is a command to install executable scripts. INSTALL_KLD is a command to install kernel loadable modules. Some architectures don't like it when the modules are stripped, therefor use this command instead of INSTALL_PROGRAM. INSTALL_DATA is a command to install sharable data. INSTALL_MAN is a command to install manpages and other documentation (it does not compress anything). These are basically the install command with all the appropriate flags. Stripping Binaries Do not strip binaries manually unless you have to. All binaries should be stripped, but the INSTALL_PROGRAM macro will install and strip a binary at the same time (see the next section). If you need to strip a file, but do not wish to use the INSTALL_PROGRAM macro, ${STRIP_CMD} will strip your program. This is typically done within the post-install target. For example: post-install: ${STRIP_CMD} ${PREFIX}/bin/xdl Use the &man.file.1; command on the installed executable to check whether the binary is stripped or not. If it does not say not stripped, it is stripped. Additionally, &man.strip.1; will not strip a previously stripped program; it will instead exit cleanly. Installing a whole tree of files Sometimes, there is a need to install a big number of files, preserving their hierarchical organization, ie. copying over a whole directory tree from WRKSRC to a target directory under PREFIX. Two macros exists for this situation. The advantage of using these macros instead of cp is that they guarantee proper file ownership and permissions on target files. The first macro, COPYTREE_BIN, will set all the installed files to be executable, thus being suitable for installing into PREFIX/bin. The second macro, COPYTREE_SHARE, does not set executable permissions on files, and is therefore suitable for installing files under PREFIX/share target. post-install: ${MKDIR} ${EXAMPLESDIR} (cd ${WRKSRC}/examples/ && ${COPYTREE_SHARE} \* ${EXAMPLESDIR}) This example will install the contents of examples directory in the vendor distfile to the proper examples location of your port. post-install: ${MKDIR} ${DATADIR}/summer (cd ${WRKSRC}/temperatures/ && ${COPYTREE_SHARE} "June July August" ${DATADIR}/summer/) And this example will install the data of summer months to the summer subdirectory of a DATADIR. Additional find arguments can be passed via the third argument to the COPYTREE_* macros. For example, to install all files from the first example except Makefiles, one can use the following command. post-install: ${MKDIR} ${EXAMPLESDIR} (cd ${WRKSRC}/examples/ && \ ${COPYTREE_SHARE} \* ${EXAMPLESDIR} "! -name Makefile") Note that these macros does not add the installed files to pkg-plist. You still need to list them. Install additional documentation If your software has some documentation other than the standard man and info pages that you think is useful for the user, install it under PREFIX/share/doc. This can be done, like the previous item, in the post-install target. Create a new directory for your port. The directory name should reflect what the port is. This usually means PORTNAME. However, if you think the user might want different versions of the port to be installed at the same time, you can use the whole PKGNAME. Make the installation dependent on the variable NOPORTDOCS so that users can disable it in /etc/make.conf, like this: post-install: .if !defined(NOPORTDOCS) ${MKDIR} ${DOCSDIR} ${INSTALL_MAN} ${WRKSRC}/docs/xvdocs.ps ${DOCSDIR} .endif Here are some handy variables and how they are expanded by default when used in the Makefile: DATADIR gets expanded to PREFIX/share/PORTNAME. DATADIR_REL gets expanded to share/PORTNAME. DOCSDIR gets expanded to PREFIX/share/doc/PORTNAME. DOCSDIR_REL gets expanded to share/doc/PORTNAME. EXAMPLESDIR gets expanded to PREFIX/share/examples/PORTNAME. EXAMPLESDIR_REL gets expanded to share/examples/PORTNAME. NOPORTDOCS only controls additional documentation installed in DOCSDIR. It does not apply to standard man pages and info pages. Things installed in DATADIR and EXAMPLESDIR are controlled by NOPORTDATA and NOPORTEXAMPLES, respectively. These variables are exported to PLIST_SUB. Their values will appear there as pathnames relative to PREFIX if possible. That is, share/doc/PORTNAME will be substituted for %%DOCSDIR%% in the packing list by default, and so on. (See more on pkg-plist substitution here.) All conditionally installed documentation files and directories should be included in pkg-plist with the %%PORTDOCS%% prefix, for example: %%PORTDOCS%%%%DOCSDIR%%/AUTHORS %%PORTDOCS%%%%DOCSDIR%%/CONTACT %%PORTDOCS%%@dirrm %%DOCSDIR%% As an alternative to enumerating the documentation files in pkg-plist, a port can set the variable PORTDOCS to a list of file names and shell glob patterns to add to the final packing list. The names will be relative to DOCSDIR. Therefore, a port that utilizes PORTDOCS and uses a non-default location for its documentation should set DOCSDIR accordingly. If a directory is listed in PORTDOCS or matched by a glob pattern from this variable, the entire subtree of contained files and directories will be registered in the final packing list. If NOPORTDOCS is defined then files and directories listed in PORTDOCS would not be installed and neither would be added to port packing list. Installing the documentation at PORTDOCS as shown above remains up to the port itself. A typical example of utilizing PORTDOCS looks as follows: PORTDOCS= README.* ChangeLog docs/* The equivalents of PORTDOCS for files installed under DATADIR and EXAMPLESDIR are PORTDATA and PORTEXAMPLES, respectively. You can also use the pkg-message file to display messages upon installation. See the section on using pkg-message for details. The pkg-message file does not need to be added to pkg-plist. Subdirectories under PREFIX Try to let the port put things in the right subdirectories of PREFIX. Some ports lump everything and put it in the subdirectory with the port's name, which is incorrect. Also, many ports put everything except binaries, header files and manual pages in a subdirectory of lib, which does not work well with the BSD paradigm. Many of the files should be moved to one of the following: etc (setup/configuration files), libexec (executables started internally), sbin (executables for superusers/managers), info (documentation for info browser) or share (architecture independent files). See &man.hier.7; for details; the rules governing /usr pretty much apply to /usr/local too. The exception are ports dealing with USENET news. They may use PREFIX/news as a destination for their files. Special considerations There are some more things you have to take into account when you create a port. This section explains the most common of those. Shared Libraries If your port installs one or more shared libraries, define a USE_LDCONFIG make variable, which will instruct a bsd.port.mk to run ${LDCONFIG} -m on the directory where the new library is installed (usually PREFIX/lib) during post-install target to register it into the shared library cache. This variable, when defined, will also facilitate addition of an appropriate @exec /sbin/ldconfig -m and @unexec /sbin/ldconfig -R pair into your pkg-plist file, so that a user who installed the package can start using the shared library immediately and de-installation will not cause the system to still believe the library is there. USE_LDCONFIG= yes If you need, you can override the default directory by setting the USE_LDCONFIG value to a list of directories into which shared libraries are to be installed. For example if your port installs shared libraries into PREFIX/lib/foo and PREFIX/lib/bar directories you could use the following in your Makefile: USE_LDCONFIG= ${PREFIX}/lib/foo ${PREFIX}/lib/bar Please double-check, often this is not necessary at all or can be avoided through -rpath or setting LD_RUN_PATH during linking (see lang/moscow_ml for an example), or through a shell-wrapper which sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH before invoking the binary, like www/mozilla does. When installing 32-bit libraries on 64-bit system, use USE_LDCONFIG32 instead. Try to keep shared library version numbers in the libfoo.so.0 format. Our runtime linker only cares for the major (first) number. When the major library version number increments in the update to the new port version, all other ports that link to the affected library should have their PORTREVISION incremented, to force recompilation with the new library version. Ports with distribution restrictions Licenses vary, and some of them place restrictions on how the application can be packaged, whether it can be sold for profit, and so on. It is your responsibility as a porter to read the licensing terms of the software and make sure that the FreeBSD project will not be held accountable for violating them by redistributing the source or compiled binaries either via FTP/HTTP or CD-ROM. If in doubt, please contact the &a.ports;. In situations like this, the variables described in the following sections can be set. <makevar>NO_PACKAGE</makevar> This variable indicates that we may not generate a binary package of the application. For instance, the license may disallow binary redistribution, or it may prohibit distribution of packages created from patched sources. However, the port's DISTFILES may be freely mirrored on FTP/HTTP. They may also be distributed on a CD-ROM (or similar media) unless NO_CDROM is set as well. NO_PACKAGE should also be used if the binary package is not generally useful, and the application should always be compiled from the source code. For example, if the application has configuration information that is site specific hard coded in to it at compile time, set NO_PACKAGE. NO_PACKAGE should be set to a string describing the reason why the package should not be generated. <makevar>NO_CDROM</makevar> This variable alone indicates that, although we are allowed to generate binary packages, we may put neither those packages nor the port's DISTFILES onto a CD-ROM (or similar media) for resale. However, the binary packages and the port's DISTFILES will still be available via FTP/HTTP. If this variable is set along with NO_PACKAGE, then only the port's DISTFILES will be available, and only via FTP/HTTP. NO_CDROM should be set to a string describing the reason why the port cannot be redistributed on CD-ROM. For instance, this should be used if the port's license is for non-commercial use only. <makevar>NOFETCHFILES</makevar> Files defined in the NOFETCHFILES variable are not fetchable from any of the MASTER_SITES. An example of such a file is when the file is supplied on CD-ROM by the vendor. Tools which check for the availability of these files on the MASTER_SITES should ignore these files and not report about them. <makevar>RESTRICTED</makevar> Set this variable alone if the application's license permits neither mirroring the application's DISTFILES nor distributing the binary package in any way. NO_CDROM or NO_PACKAGE should not be set along with RESTRICTED since the latter variable implies the former ones. RESTRICTED should be set to a string describing the reason why the port cannot be redistributed. Typically, this indicates that the port contains proprietary software and that the user will need to manually download the DISTFILES, possibly after registering for the software or agreeing to accept the terms of an EULA. <makevar>RESTRICTED_FILES</makevar> When RESTRICTED or NO_CDROM is set, this variable defaults to ${DISTFILES} ${PATCHFILES}, otherwise it is empty. If only some of the distribution files are restricted, then set this variable to list them. Note that the port committer should add an entry to /usr/ports/LEGAL for every listed distribution file, describing exactly what the restriction entails. Building mechanisms Parallel ports building The &os; ports framework supports parallel building using multiple make sub-processes, which allows SMP systems to utilize all of their available CPU power, allowing port builds to be faster and more effective. This is achieved by passing -jX flag to &man.make.1; running on vendor code. Unfortunately, not all ports handle parallel building well. Therefore it is required to explicitly enable this feature by adding MAKE_JOBS_SAFE=yes somewhere below the dependency declaration section of the Makefile. Another option for controlling this feature from the maintainer's point of view is the MAKE_JOBS_UNSAFE=yes variable. It is used when a port is known to be broken with -jX and a user forces the use of multi processor compilations for all ports in /etc/make.conf with the FORCE_MAKE_JOBS=yes variable. <command>make</command>, <command>gmake</command>, and <command>imake</command> If your port uses GNU make, set USE_GMAKE=yes. Variables for ports related to gmake Variable Means USE_GMAKE The port requires gmake to build. GMAKE The full path for gmake if it is not in the PATH.
If your port is an X application that creates Makefile files from Imakefile files using imake, then set USE_IMAKE=yes. This will cause the configure stage to automatically do an xmkmf -a. If the flag is a problem for your port, set XMKMF=xmkmf. If the port uses imake but does not understand the install.man target, NO_INSTALL_MANPAGES=yes should be set. If your port's source Makefile has something else than all as the main build target, set ALL_TARGET accordingly. Same goes for install and INSTALL_TARGET. <command>configure</command> script If your port uses the configure script to generate Makefile files from Makefile.in files, set GNU_CONFIGURE=yes. If you want to give extra arguments to the configure script (the default argument is --prefix=${PREFIX} --infodir=${PREFIX}/${INFO_PATH} --mandir=${MANPREFIX}/man --build=${CONFIGURE_TARGET}), set those extra arguments in CONFIGURE_ARGS. Extra environment variables can be passed using CONFIGURE_ENV variable. Variables for ports that use configure Variable Means GNU_CONFIGURE The port uses configure script to prepare build. HAS_CONFIGURE Same as GNU_CONFIGURE, except default configure target is not added to CONFIGURE_ARGS. CONFIGURE_ARGS Additional arguments passed to configure script. CONFIGURE_ENV Additional environment variables to be set for configure script run. CONFIGURE_TARGET Override default configure target. Default value is ${MACHINE_ARCH}-portbld-freebsd${OSREL}.
Using <command>scons</command> If your port uses SCons, define USE_SCONS=yes. Variables for ports that use <command>scons</command> Variable Means SCONS_ARGS Port specific SCons flags passed to the SCons environment. SCONS_BUILDENV Variables to be set in system environment. SCONS_ENV Variables to be set in SCons environment. SCONS_TARGET Last argument passed to SCons, similar to MAKE_TARGET.
To make third party SConstruct respect everything that is passed to SCons in SCONS_ENV (that is, most importantly, CC/CXX/CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS), patch the SConstruct so build Environment is constructed like this: env = Environment(**ARGUMENTS) It may be then modified with env.Append and env.Replace. Using GNU autotools Introduction The various GNU autotools provide an abstraction mechanism for building a piece of software over a wide variety of operating systems and machine architectures. Within the Ports Collection, an individual port can make use of these tools via a simple construct: USE_AUTOTOOLS= tool:version[:operation] ... At the time of writing, tool can be one of libtool, libltdl, autoconf, autoheader, automake or aclocal. version specifies the particular tool revision to be used (see devel/{automake,autoconf,libtool}[0-9]+ for valid versions). operation is an optional extension to modify how the tool is used. Multiple tools can be specified at once, either by including them all on a single line, or using the += Makefile construct. Finally, there is the special tool, called autotools, which is a convenience function to bring in all available versions of the autotools to allow for cross-development work. This can also be accomplished by installing the devel/autotools port. <command>libtool</command> Shared libraries using the GNU building framework usually use libtool to adjust the compilation and installation of shared libraries to match the specifics of the underlying operating system. The usual practice is to use copy of libtool bundled with the application. In case you need to use external libtool, you can use the version provided by The Ports Collection: USE_AUTOTOOLS= libtool:version[:env] With no additional operations, libtool:version tells the building framework to patch the configure script with the system-installed copy of libtool. The GNU_CONFIGURE is implied. Further, a number of make and shell variables will be assigned for onward use by the port. See bsd.autotools.mk for details. With the :env operation, only the environment will be set up. Finally, LIBTOOLFLAGS and LIBTOOLFILES can be optionally set to override the most likely arguments to, and files patched by, libtool. Most ports are unlikely to need this. See bsd.autotools.mk for further details. <command>libltdl</command> Some ports make use of the libltdl library package, which is part of the libtool suite. Use of this library does not automatically necessitate the use of libtool itself, so a separate construct is provided. USE_AUTOTOOLS= libltdl:version Currently, all this does is to bring in a LIB_DEPENDS on the appropriate libltdl port, and is provided as a convenience function to help eliminate any dependencies on the autotools ports outside of the USE_AUTOTOOLS framework. There are no optional operations for this tool. <command>autoconf</command> and <command>autoheader</command> Some ports do not contain a configure script, but do contain an autoconf template in the configure.ac file. You can use the following assignments to let autoconf create the configure script, and also have autoheader create template headers for use by the configure script. USE_AUTOTOOLS= autoconf:version[:env] and USE_AUTOTOOLS= autoheader:version which also implies the use of autoconf:version. Similarly to libtool, the inclusion of the optional :env operation simply sets up the environment for further use. Without it, patching and reconfiguration of the port is carried out. The additional optional variables AUTOCONF_ARGS and AUTOHEADER_ARGS can be overridden by the port Makefile if specifically requested. As with the libtool equivalents, most ports are unlikely to need this. <command>automake</command> and <command>aclocal</command> Some packages only contain Makefile.am files. These have to be converted into Makefile.in files using automake, and the further processed by configure to generate an actual Makefile. Similarly, packages occasionally do not ship with included aclocal.m4 files, again required to build the software. This can be achieved with aclocal, which scans configure.ac or configure.in. aclocal has a similar relationship to automake as autoheader does to autoconf, described in the previous section. aclocal implies the use of automake, thus we have: USE_AUTOTOOLS= automake:version[:env] and USE_AUTOTOOLS= aclocal:version which also implies the use of automake:version. Similarly to libtool and autoconf, the inclusion of the optional :env operation simply sets up the environment for further use. Without it, reconfiguration of the port is carried out. As with autoconf and autoheader, both automake and aclocal have optional argument variables, AUTOMAKE_ARGS and ACLOCAL_ARGS respectively, which may be overriden by the port Makefile if required. Using GNU <literal>gettext</literal> Basic usage If your port requires gettext, just set USE_GETTEXT to yes, and your port will grow the dependency on devel/gettext. The value of USE_GETTEXT can also specify the required version of the libintl library, the basic part of gettext, but using this feature is strongly discouraged: Your port should work with just the current version of devel/gettext. A rather common case is a port using gettext and configure. Generally, GNU configure should be able to locate gettext automatically. If it ever fails to, hints at the location of gettext can be passed in CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS as follows: USE_GETTEXT= yes CPPFLAGS+= -I${LOCALBASE}/include LDFLAGS+= -L${LOCALBASE}/lib GNU_CONFIGURE= yes CONFIGURE_ENV= CPPFLAGS="${CPPFLAGS}" \ LDFLAGS="${LDFLAGS}" Of course, the code can be more compact if there are no more flags to pass to configure: USE_GETTEXT= yes GNU_CONFIGURE= yes CONFIGURE_ENV= CPPFLAGS="-I${LOCALBASE}/include" \ LDFLAGS="-L${LOCALBASE}/lib" Optional usage Some software products allow for disabling NLS, e.g., through passing to configure. In that case, your port should use gettext conditionally, depending on the status of WITHOUT_NLS. For ports of low to medium complexity, you can rely on the following idiom: GNU_CONFIGURE= yes .if !defined(WITHOUT_NLS) USE_GETTEXT= yes PLIST_SUB+= NLS="" .else CONFIGURE_ARGS+= --disable-nls PLIST_SUB+= NLS="@comment " .endif The next item on your to-do list is to arrange so that the message catalog files are included in the packing list conditionally. The Makefile part of this task is already provided by the idiom. It is explained in the section on advanced pkg-plist practices. In a nutshell, each occurrence of %%NLS%% in pkg-plist will be replaced by @comment  if NLS is disabled, or by a null string if NLS is enabled. Consequently, the lines prefixed by %%NLS%% will become mere comments in the final packing list if NLS is off; otherwise the prefix will be just left out. All you need to do now is insert %%NLS%% before each path to a message catalog file in pkg-plist. For example: %%NLS%%share/locale/fr/LC_MESSAGES/foobar.mo %%NLS%%share/locale/no/LC_MESSAGES/foobar.mo In high complexity cases, you may need to use more advanced techniques than the recipe given here, such as dynamic packing list generation. Handling message catalog directories There is a point to note about installing message catalog files. The target directories for them, which reside under LOCALBASE/share/locale, should rarely be created and removed by your port. The most popular languages have their respective directories listed in /etc/mtree/BSD.local.dist; that is, they are a part of the base system. The directories for many other languages are governed by the devel/gettext port. You may want to consult its pkg-plist and see whether your port is going to install a message catalog file for a unique language. Using <literal>perl</literal> If MASTER_SITES is set to MASTER_SITE_PERL_CPAN, then preferred value of MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR is top-level hierarchy name. For example, the recommend value for p5-Module-Name is Module. The top-level hierarchy can be examined at cpan.org. This keeps the port working when the author of the module changes. The exception to this rule is when the relevant directory does not exist or the distfile does not exist in the directory. In such case, using author's id as MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR is allowed. All of the tunable knobs below accept both YES and a version string, like 5.8.0+. Using YES means that the port can be used with all of the supported Perl versions. If a port only works with specific versions of Perl, it can be indicated with a version string, specifying a minimal version (e.g. 5.7.3+), a maximal version (e.g. 5.8.0-) or an exact version (e.g. 5.8.3). Variables for ports that use <literal>perl</literal> Variable Means USE_PERL5 Says that the port uses perl 5 to build and run. USE_PERL5_BUILD Says that the port uses perl 5 to build. USE_PERL5_RUN Says that the port uses perl 5 to run. PERL The full path of perl 5, either in the system or installed from a port, but without the version number. Use this if you need to replace #!lines in scripts. PERL_CONFIGURE Configure using Perl's MakeMaker. It implies USE_PERL5. PERL_MODBUILD Configure, build and install using Module::Build. It implies PERL_CONFIGURE. Read only variables PERL_VERSION The full version of perl installed (e.g., 5.8.9). PERL_LEVEL The installed perl version as an integer of the form MNNNPP (e.g., 500809). PERL_ARCH Where perl stores architecture dependent libraries. Defaults to ${ARCH}-freebsd. PERL_PORT Name of the perl port that is installed (e.g., perl5). SITE_PERL Directory name where site specific perl packages go. This value is added to PLIST_SUB.
Ports of Perl modules, which do not have an official website, should link cpan.org in the WWW line of a pkg-descr file. The preferred URL form is http://search.cpan.org/dist/Module-Name/ (including the trailing slash). Using X11 X.Org components The X11 implementation available in The Ports Collection is X.Org. If your application depends on X components, set USE_XORG to the list of required components. Available components, at the time of writing, are: bigreqsproto compositeproto damageproto dmx dmxproto evieproto fixesproto fontcacheproto fontenc fontsproto fontutil glproto ice inputproto kbproto libfs oldx printproto randrproto recordproto renderproto resourceproto scrnsaverproto sm trapproto videoproto x11 xau xaw xaw6 xaw7 xaw8 xbitmaps xcmiscproto xcomposite xcursor xdamage xdmcp xevie xext xextproto xf86bigfontproto xf86dgaproto xf86driproto xf86miscproto xf86rushproto xf86vidmodeproto xfixes xfont xfontcache xft xi xinerama xineramaproto xkbfile xkbui xmu xmuu xorg-server xp xpm xprintapputil xprintutil xpr oto xproxymngproto xrandr xrender xres xscrnsaver xt xtrans xtrap xtst xv xvmc xxf86dga xxf86misc xxf86vm. Always up-to-date list can be found in /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.xorg.mk. The Mesa Project is an effort to provide free OpenGL implementation. You can specify a dependency on various components of this project with USE_GL variable. Valid options are: glut, glu, glw, glew, gl and linux. For backwards compatibility, the value of yes maps to glu. USE_XORG example USE_XORG= xrender xft xkbfile xt xaw USE_GL= glu Many ports define USE_XLIB, which makes the port depend on all the 50 or so libraries. This variable exists for backwards compatibility, as it predates modular X.Org, and should not be used on new ports. Variables for ports that use X USE_XLIB The port uses the X libraries. Deprecated - use a list of X.Org components in USE_XORG variable instead. USE_IMAKE The port uses imake. USE_X_PREFIX Deprecated. Today it is equivalent to USE_XLIB and can be replaced by it freely. XMKMF Set to the path of xmkmf if not in the PATH. Defaults to xmkmf -a.
Variables for depending on individual parts of X11 X_IMAKE_PORT Port providing imake and several other utilities used to build X11. X_LIBRARIES_PORT Port providing X11 libraries. X_CLIENTS_PORT Port providing X clients. X_SERVER_PORT Port providing X server. X_FONTSERVER_PORT Port providing font server. X_PRINTSERVER_PORT Port providing print server. X_VFBSERVER_PORT Port providing virtual framebuffer server. X_NESTSERVER_PORT Port providing a nested X server. X_FONTS_ENCODINGS_PORT Port providing encodings for fonts. X_FONTS_MISC_PORT Port providing miscellaneous bitmap fonts. X_FONTS_100DPI_PORT Port providing 100dpi bitmap fonts. X_FONTS_75DPI_PORT Port providing 75dpi bitmap fonts. X_FONTS_CYRILLIC_PORT Port providing cyrillic bitmap fonts. X_FONTS_TTF_PORT Port providing &truetype; fonts. X_FONTS_TYPE1_PORT Port providing Type1 fonts. X_MANUALS_PORT Port providing developer oriented manual pages
Using X11 related variables in port # Use some X11 libraries and depend on # font server as well as cyrillic fonts. RUN_DEPENDS= ${LOCALBASE}/bin/xfs:${X_FONTSERVER_PORT} \ ${LOCALBASE}/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic/crox1c.pcf.gz:${X_FONTS_CYRILLIC_PORT} USE_XORG= x11 xpm Ports that require Motif If your port requires a Motif library, define USE_MOTIF in the Makefile. Default Motif implementation is x11-toolkits/open-motif. Users can choose x11-toolkits/lesstif instead by setting WANT_LESSTIF variable. The MOTIFLIB variable will be set by bsd.port.mk to reference the appropriate Motif library. Please patch the source of your port to use ${MOTIFLIB} wherever the Motif library is referenced in the original Makefile or Imakefile. There are two common cases: If the port refers to the Motif library as -lXm in its Makefile or Imakefile, simply substitute ${MOTIFLIB} for it. If the port uses XmClientLibs in its Imakefile, change it to ${MOTIFLIB} ${XTOOLLIB} ${XLIB}. Note that MOTIFLIB (usually) expands to -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lXm or /usr/X11R6/lib/libXm.a, so there is no need to add -L or -l in front. X11 fonts If your port installs fonts for the X Window System, put them in LOCALBASE/lib/X11/fonts/local. Getting fake <envar>DISPLAY</envar> using Xvfb Some applications require a working X11 display for compilation to succeed. This pose a problem for machines that operate headless. When the following variable is used, the build infrastructure will start the virtual framebuffer X server. The working DISPLAY is then passed to the build. USE_DISPLAY= yes Desktop entries Desktop Entries (Freedesktop standard) can be easily created in your port using DESKTOP_ENTRIES variable. These entries do show up in application menus of compliant desktop environments like GNOME or KDE. The .desktop file will be created, installed, and added to the pkg-plist automatically. Syntax is: DESKTOP_ENTRIES= "NAME" "COMMENT" "ICON" "COMMAND" "CATEGORY" StartupNotify The list of possible categories is available on the Freedesktop website. The StartupNotify indicates, if the application will clear the status in startup notification aware environment. Example: DESKTOP_ENTRIES= "ToME" "Roguelike game based on JRR Tolkien's work" \ "${DATADIR}/xtra/graf/tome-128.png" \ "tome -v -g" "Application;Game;RolePlaying;" \ false Using GNOME The FreeBSD/GNOME project uses its own set of variables to define which GNOME components a particular port uses. A comprehensive list of these variables exists within the FreeBSD/GNOME project's homepage. Using Qt Ports that require Qt Variables for ports that use Qt USE_QT_VER The port uses the Qt toolkit. Possible values are 3 and 4; each specify the major version of Qt to use. Appropriate parameters are passed to configure script and make. QT_PREFIX Set to the path where Qt installed to (read-only variable). MOC Set to the path of moc (read-only variable). Default set according to USE_QT_VER value. QTCPPFLAGS Additional compiler flags passed via CONFIGURE_ENV for Qt toolkit. Default set according to USE_QT_VER. QTCFGLIBS Additional libraries for linking passed via CONFIGURE_ENV for Qt toolkit. Default set according to USE_QT_VER. QTNONSTANDARD Suppress modification of CONFIGURE_ENV, CONFIGURE_ARGS, and MAKE_ENV.
Additional variables for ports that use Qt 4.x QT_COMPONENTS Specify tool and library dependencies for Qt4. See below for details. UIC Set to the path of uic (read-only variable). Default set according to USE_QT_VER value. QMAKE Set to the path of qmake (read-only variable). Default set according to USE_QT_VER value. QMAKESPEC Set to the path of configuration file for qmake (read-only variable). Default set according to USE_QT_VER value.
When USE_QT_VER is set, some useful settings are passed to configure script: CONFIGURE_ARGS+= --with-qt-includes=${QT_PREFIX}/include \ --with-qt-libraries=${QT_PREFIX}/lib \ --with-extra-libs=${LOCALBASE}/lib \ --with-extra-includes=${LOCALBASE}/include CONFIGURE_ENV+= MOC="${MOC}" CPPFLAGS="${CPPFLAGS} ${QTCPPFLAGS}" LIBS="${QTCFGLIBS}" \ QTDIR="${QT_PREFIX}" KDEDIR="${KDE_PREFIX}" If USE_QT_VER is set to 4, the following settings are also deployed: CONFIGURE_ENV+= UIC="${UIC}" QMAKE="${QMAKE}" QMAKESPEC="${QMAKESPEC}" MAKE_ENV+= QMAKESPEC="${QMAKESPEC}" Component selection (Qt 4.x only) When USE_QT_VER is set to 4, individual Qt4 tool and library dependencies can be specified in the QT_COMPONENTS variable. Every component can be suffixed by either _build or _run, the suffix indicating whether the component should be depended on at buildtime or runtime, respectively. If unsuffixed, the component will be depended on at both build- and runtime. Usually, library components should be specified unsuffixed, tool components should be specified with the _build suffix and plugin components should be specified with the _run suffix. The most commonly used components are listed below (all available components are listed in _QT_COMPONENTS_ALL in /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.qt.mk): Available Qt4 library components Name Description corelib core library (can be omitted unless the port uses nothing but corelib) gui graphical user interface library network network library opengl OpenGL library qt3support Qt3 compatibility library qtestlib unit testing library script script library sql SQL library xml XML library
You can determine which libraries the application depends on, by running ldd on the main executable after a successful compilation. Available Qt4 tool components Name Description moc meta object compiler (needed for almost every Qt application at buildtime) qmake Makefile generator / build utility rcc resource compiler (need if the application comes with *.rc or *.qrc files) uic user interface compiler (needed if the application comes with *.ui files created by Qt Designer - in practice, every Qt application with a GUI)
Available Qt4 plugin components Name Description iconengines SVG icon engine plugin (if the application ships SVG icons) imageformats imageformat plugins for GIF, JPEG, MNG and SVG (if the application ships image files)
Selecting Qt4 components In this example, the ported application uses the Qt4 graphical user interface library, the Qt4 core library, all of the Qt4 code generation tools and Qt4's Makefile generator. Since the gui library implies a dependency on the core library, corelib does not need to be specified. The Qt4 code generation tools moc, uic and rcc, as well as the Makefile generator qmake are only needed at buildtime, thus they are specified with the _build suffix: USE_QT_VER= 4 QT_COMPONENTS= gui moc_build qmake_build rcc_build uic_build Additional considerations If the application does not provide a configure file but a .pro file, you can use the following: HAS_CONFIGURE= yes do-configure: @cd ${WRKSRC} && ${SETENV} ${CONFIGURE_ENV} \ ${QMAKE} -unix PREFIX=${PREFIX} texmaker.pro Note the similarity to the qmake line from the provided BUILD.sh script. Passing CONFIGURE_ENV ensures qmake will see the QMAKESPEC variable, without which it cannot work. qmake generates standard Makefiles, so it is not necessary to write our own build target. Qt applications often are written to be cross-platform and often X11/Unix isn't the platform they are developed on, which in turn often leads to certain loose ends, like: Missing additional includepaths. Many applications come with system tray icon support, but neglect to look for includes and/or libraries in the X11 directories. You can tell qmake to add directories to the include and library searchpaths - via the commandline, for example: + via the command line, for example: ${QMAKE} -unix PREFIX=${PREFIX} INCLUDEPATH+=${LOCALBASE}/include \ LIBS+=-L${LOCALBASE}/lib sillyapp.pro Bogus installation paths. Sometimes data such as icons or .desktop files are by default installed into directories which aren't scanned by XDG-compatible applications. editors/texmaker is an example for this - look at patch-texmaker.pro in the files directory of that port for a template on how to remedy this directly in the Qmake project file. Using KDE Variable definitions (KDE 3.x only) Variables for ports that use KDE 3.x USE_KDELIBS_VER The port uses KDE libraries. It specifies the major version of KDE to use and implies USE_QT_VER of the appropriate version. The only possible value is 3. USE_KDEBASE_VER The port uses KDE base. It specifies the major version of KDE to use and implies USE_QT_VER of the appropriate version. The only possible value is 3.
KDE 4 variable definitions If your application depends on KDE 4.x, set USE_KDE4 to the list of required components. The most commonly used components are listed below (up-to-date components are listed in _USE_KDE4_ALL in /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.kde4.mk): Available KDE4 components Name Description akonadi Personal information management (PIM) storage service automoc4 Makes port use automoc4 build tool kdebase Basic KDE applications (Konqueror, Dolphin, Konsole) kdeexp Experimental KDE libraries (with non-stable API) kdehier Provides common KDE directories kdelibs The base set of KDE libraries kdeprefix If set, port will be installed into ${KDE4_PREFIX} instead of ${LOCALBASE} pimlibs PIM libraries workspace Applications and libraries which form desktop (Plasma, KWin)
KDE 4.x ports are installed into ${KDE4_PREFIX}, which is /usr/local/kde4 currently, to avoid conflicts with KDE 3.x ports. This is achieved by specifying the kdeprefix component, which overrides the default PREFIX. The ports however respect any PREFIX set via MAKEFLAGS environment variable and/or make arguments. KDE 4.x ports may conflict with KDE 3.x ports, so when the kdeprefix component is enabled, they are installed in ${KDE4_PREFIX}. The default value of KDE4_PREFIX is currently /usr/local/kde4. Installing the KDE 4.x ports into a custom PREFIX is also possible. When PREFIX is set via the MAKEFLAGS environment variable or via make options it overrides the value configured by kdeprefix. <makevar>USE_KDE4</makevar> example This is a simple example for KDE 4 port. USE_CMAKE instructs port to utilize CMake — configuration tool widely spread among KDE 4 projects. USE_KDE4 brings dependency on KDE libraries and makes port using automoc4 at build stage. Required KDE components and other dependencies can be determined through configure log. USE_KDE4 does not imply USE_QT_VER. If port requires some of Qt4 components, USE_QT_VER should be set and then needed components can be specified. USE_CMAKE= yes USE_KDE4= automoc4 kdelibs kdeprefix USE_QT_VER= 4 QT_COMPONENTS= qmake_build moc_build rcc_build uic_build Using Java Variable definitions If your port needs a Java™ Development Kit (JDK™) to either build, run or even extract the distfile, then it should define USE_JAVA. There are several JDKs in the ports collection, from various vendors, and in several versions. If your port must use one of these versions, you can define which one. The most current version is java/jdk16. Variables that may be set by ports that use Java Variable Means USE_JAVA Should be defined for the remaining variables to have any effect. JAVA_VERSION List of space-separated suitable Java versions for the port. An optional "+" allows you to specify a range of versions (allowed values: 1.1[+] 1.2[+] 1.3[+] 1.4[+] 1.5[+] 1.6[+]). JAVA_OS List of space-separated suitable JDK port operating systems for the port (allowed values: native linux). JAVA_VENDOR List of space-separated suitable JDK port vendors for the port (allowed values: freebsd bsdjava sun ibm blackdown). JAVA_BUILD When set, it means that the selected JDK port should be added to the build dependencies of the port. JAVA_RUN When set, it means that the selected JDK port should be added to the run dependencies of the port. JAVA_EXTRACT When set, it means that the selected JDK port should be added to the extract dependencies of the port. USE_JIKES Whether the port should or should not use the jikes bytecode compiler to build. When no value is set for this variable, the port will use jikes to build if available. You may also explicitly forbid or enforce the use of jikes (by setting 'no' or 'yes'). In the later case, devel/jikes will be added to build dependencies of the port. In any case that jikes is actually used in place of javac, then the HAVE_JIKES variable is defined by bsd.java.mk.
Below is the list of all settings a port will receive after setting USE_JAVA: Variables provided to ports that use Java Variable Value JAVA_PORT The name of the JDK port (e.g. 'java/jdk14'). JAVA_PORT_VERSION The full version of the JDK port (e.g. '1.4.2'). If you only need the first two digits of this version number, use ${JAVA_PORT_VERSION:C/^([0-9])\.([0-9])(.*)$/\1.\2/}. JAVA_PORT_OS The operating system used by the JDK port (e.g. 'linux'). JAVA_PORT_VENDOR The vendor of the JDK port (e.g. 'sun'). JAVA_PORT_OS_DESCRIPTION Description of the operating system used by the JDK port (e.g. 'Linux'). JAVA_PORT_VENDOR_DESCRIPTION Description of the vendor of the JDK port (e.g. 'FreeBSD Foundation'). JAVA_HOME Path to the installation directory of the JDK (e.g. '/usr/local/jdk1.3.1'). JAVAC Path to the Java compiler to use (e.g. '/usr/local/jdk1.3.1/bin/javac' or '/usr/local/bin/jikes'). JAR Path to the jar tool to use (e.g. '/usr/local/jdk1.3.1/bin/jar' or '/usr/local/bin/fastjar'). APPLETVIEWER Path to the appletviewer utility (e.g. '/usr/local/linux-jdk1.3.1/bin/appletviewer'). JAVA Path to the java executable. Use this for executing Java programs (e.g. '/usr/local/jdk1.3.1/bin/java'). JAVADOC Path to the javadoc utility program. JAVAH Path to the javah program. JAVAP Path to the javap program. JAVA_KEYTOOL Path to the keytool utility program. JAVA_N2A Path to the native2ascii tool. JAVA_POLICYTOOL Path to the policytool program. JAVA_SERIALVER Path to the serialver utility program. RMIC Path to the RMI stub/skeleton generator, rmic. RMIREGISTRY Path to the RMI registry program, rmiregistry. RMID Path to the RMI daemon program rmid. JAVA_CLASSES Path to the archive that contains the JDK class files, ${JAVA_HOME}/jre/lib/rt.jar. HAVE_JIKES Defined whenever jikes is used by the port (see USE_JIKES above).
You may use the java-debug make target to get information for debugging your port. It will display the value of many of the forecited variables. Additionally, the following constants are defined so all Java ports may be installed in a consistent way: Constants defined for ports that use Java Constant Value JAVASHAREDIR The base directory for everything related to Java. Default: ${PREFIX}/share/java. JAVAJARDIR The directory where JAR files should be installed. Default: ${JAVASHAREDIR}/classes. JAVALIBDIR The directory where JAR files installed by other ports are located. Default: ${LOCALBASE}/share/java/classes.
The related entries are defined in both PLIST_SUB (documented in ) and SUB_LIST. Building with Ant When the port is to be built using Apache Ant, it has to define USE_ANT. Ant is thus considered to be the sub-make command. When no do-build target is defined by the port, a default one will be set that simply runs Ant according to MAKE_ENV, MAKE_ARGS and ALL_TARGET. This is similar to the USE_GMAKE mechanism, which is documented in . If jikes is used in place of javac (see USE_JIKES in ), then Ant will automatically use it to build the port. Best practices When porting a Java library, your port should install the JAR file(s) in ${JAVAJARDIR}, and everything else under ${JAVASHAREDIR}/${PORTNAME} (except for the documentation, see below). In order to reduce the packing file size, you may reference the JAR file(s) directly in the Makefile. Just use the following statement (where myport.jar is the name of the JAR file installed as part of the port): PLIST_FILES+= %%JAVAJARDIR%%/myport.jar When porting a Java application, the port usually installs everything under a single directory (including its JAR dependencies). The use of ${JAVASHAREDIR}/${PORTNAME} is strongly encouraged in this regard. It is up the porter to decide whether the port should install the additional JAR dependencies under this directory or directly use the already installed ones (from ${JAVAJARDIR}). Regardless of the type of your port (library or application), the additional documentation should be installed in the same location as for any other port. The JavaDoc tool is known to produce a different set of files depending on the version of the JDK that is used. For ports that do not enforce the use of a particular JDK, it is therefore a complex task to specify the packing list (pkg-plist). This is one reason why porters are strongly encouraged to use the PORTDOCS macro. Moreover, even if you can predict the set of files that will be generated by javadoc, the size of the resulting pkg-plist advocates for the use of PORTDOCS. The default value for DATADIR is ${PREFIX}/share/${PORTNAME}. It is a good idea to override DATADIR to ${JAVASHAREDIR}/${PORTNAME} for Java ports. Indeed, DATADIR is automatically added to PLIST_SUB (documented in ) so you may use %%DATADIR%% directly in pkg-plist. As for the choice of building Java ports from source or directly installing them from a binary distribution, there is no defined policy at the time of writing. However, people from the &os; Java Project encourage porters to have their ports built from source whenever it is a trivial task. All the features that have been presented in this section are implemented in bsd.java.mk. If you ever think that your port needs more sophisticated Java support, please first have a look at the bsd.java.mk CVS log as it usually takes some time to document the latest features. Then, if you think the support you are lacking would be beneficial to many other Java ports, feel free to discuss it on the &a.java;. Although there is a java category for PRs, it refers to the JDK porting effort from the &os; Java project. Therefore, you should submit your Java port in the ports category as for any other port, unless the issue you are trying to resolve is related to either a JDK implementation or bsd.java.mk. Similarly, there is a defined policy regarding the CATEGORIES of a Java port, which is detailed in . Web applications, Apache and PHP Apache Variables for ports that use Apache USE_APACHE The port requires Apache. Possible values: yes (gets any version), 1.3, 2.0, 2.2, 2.0+, etc. Default dependency is on version 1.3. WITH_APACHE2 The port requires Apache 2.0. Without this variable, the port will depend on Apache 1.3. This variable is deprecated and should not be used anymore. APXS Full path to the apxs binary. Can be overriden in your port. HTTPD Full path to the httpd binary. Can be overriden in your port. APACHE_VERSION The version of present Apache installation (read-only variable). This variable is only available after inclusion of bsd.port.pre.mk. Possible values: 13, 20, 22. APACHEMODDIR Directory for Apache modules. This variable is automatically expanded in pkg-plist. APACHEINCLUDEDIR Directory for Apache headers. This variable is automatically expanded in pkg-plist. APACHEETCDIR Directory for Apache configuration files. This variable is automatically expanded in pkg-plist.
Useful variables for porting Apache modules MODULENAME Name of the module. Default value is PORTNAME. Example: mod_hello SHORTMODNAME Short name of the module. Automatically derived from MODULENAME, but can be overriden. Example: hello AP_FAST_BUILD Use apxs to compile and install the module. AP_GENPLIST Also automatically creates a pkg-plist. AP_INC Adds a directory to a header search path during compilation. AP_LIB Adds a directory to a library search path during compilation. AP_EXTRAS Additional flags to pass to apxs.
Web applications Web applications should be installed into PREFIX/www/appname. For your convenience, this path is available both in Makefile and in pkg-plist as WWWDIR, and the path relative to PREFIX is available in Makefile as WWWDIR_REL. The user and group of web server process are available as WWWOWN and WWWGRP, in case you need to change the ownership of some files. The default values of both are www. If you want different values for your port, use WWWOWN?= myuser notation, to allow user to override it easily. Do not depend on Apache unless the web app explicitly needs Apache. Respect that users may wish to run your web app on different web server than Apache. PHP Variables for ports that use PHP USE_PHP The port requires PHP. The value yes adds a dependency on PHP. The list of required PHP extensions can be specified instead. Example: pcre xml gettext DEFAULT_PHP_VER Selects which major version of PHP will be installed as a dependency when no PHP is installed yet. Default is 4. Possible values: 4, 5 IGNORE_WITH_PHP The port does not work with PHP of the given version. Possible values: 4, 5 USE_PHPIZE The port will be built as a PHP extension. USE_PHPEXT The port will be treated as a PHP extension, including installation and registration in the extension registry. USE_PHP_BUILD Set PHP as a build dependency. WANT_PHP_CLI Want the CLI (command line) version of PHP. WANT_PHP_CGI Want the CGI version of PHP. WANT_PHP_MOD Want the Apache module version of PHP. WANT_PHP_SCR Want the CLI or the CGI version of PHP. WANT_PHP_WEB Want the Apache module or the CGI version of PHP.
PEAR modules Porting PEAR modules is a very simple process. Use the variables FILES, TESTS, DATA, SQLS, SCRIPTFILES, DOCS and EXAMPLES to list the files you want to install. All listed files will be automatically installed into the appropriate locations and added to pkg-plist. Include ${PORTSDIR}/devel/pear/bsd.pear.mk on the last line of the Makefile. Example Makefile for PEAR class PORTNAME= Date PORTVERSION= 1.4.3 CATEGORIES= devel www pear MAINTAINER= example@domain.com COMMENT= PEAR Date and Time Zone Classes BUILD_DEPENDS= ${PEARDIR}/PEAR.php:${PORTSDIR}/devel/pear-PEAR RUN_DEPENDS= ${BUILD_DEPENDS} FILES= Date.php Date/Calc.php Date/Human.php Date/Span.php \ Date/TimeZone.php TESTS= test_calc.php test_date_methods_span.php testunit.php \ testunit_date.php testunit_date_span.php wknotest.txt \ bug674.php bug727_1.php bug727_2.php bug727_3.php \ bug727_4.php bug967.php weeksinmonth_4_monday.txt \ weeksinmonth_4_sunday.txt weeksinmonth_rdm_monday.txt \ weeksinmonth_rdm_sunday.txt DOCS= TODO _DOCSDIR= . .include <bsd.port.pre.mk> .include "${PORTSDIR}/devel/pear/bsd.pear.mk" .include <bsd.port.post.mk> Using Python The Ports Collection supports parallel installation of multiple Python versions. Ports should make sure to use a correct python interpreter, according to the user-settable PYTHON_VERSION variable. Most prominently, this means replacing the path to python executable in scripts with the value of PYTHON_CMD variable. Ports that install files under PYTHON_SITELIBDIR should use the pyXY- package name prefix, so their package name embeds the version of Python they are installed into. PKGNAMEPREFIX= ${PYTHON_PKGNAMEPREFIX} Most useful variables for ports that use Python USE_PYTHON The port needs Python. Minimal required version can be specified with values such as 2.3+. Version ranges can also be specified, by separating two version numbers with a dash, e.g.: 2.1-2.3 USE_PYDISTUTILS Use Python distutils for configuring, compiling and installing. This is required when the port comes with setup.py. This overrides the do-build and do-install targets and may also override do-configure if GNU_CONFIGURE is not defined. PYTHON_PKGNAMEPREFIX Used as a PKGNAMEPREFIX to distinguish packages for different Python versions. Example: py24- PYTHON_SITELIBDIR Location of the site-packages tree, that contains installation path of Python (usually LOCALBASE). The PYTHON_SITELIBDIR variable can be very useful when installing Python modules. PYTHONPREFIX_SITELIBDIR The PREFIX-clean variant of PYTHON_SITELIBDIR. Always use %%PYTHON_SITELIBDIR%% in pkg-plist when possible. The default value of %%PYTHON_SITELIBDIR%% is lib/python%%PYTHON_VERSION%%/site-packages PYTHON_CMD Python interpreter command line, including version number. PYNUMERIC Dependency line for numeric extension. PYNUMPY Dependency line for the new numeric extension, numpy. (PYNUMERIC is deprecated by upstream vendor). PYXML Dependency line for XML extension (not needed for Python 2.0 and higher as it is also in base distribution). USE_TWISTED Add dependency on twistedCore. The list of required components can be specified as a value of this variable. Example: web lore pair flow USE_ZOPE Add dependency on Zope, a web application platform. Change Python dependency to Python 2.3. Set ZOPEBASEDIR containing a directory with Zope installation.
A complete list of available variables can be found in /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.python.mk. Using <application>Tcl/Tk</application> The Ports Collection supports parallel installation of multiple Tcl/Tk versions. Ports should try to support at least the default Tcl/Tk version and higher with the USE_TCL and USE_TK variables. It is possible to specify the desired version of tcl with the WITH_TCL_VER variable. The most useful variables for ports that use <application>Tcl/Tk</application> USE_TCL The port depends on the Tcl library (not the shell). Minimal required version can be specified with values such as 84+. Individual unsupported versions can be specified with the INVALID_TCL_VER variable. USE_TCL_BUILD The port needs Tcl only during the build time. USE_TCL_WRAPPER Ports that require the Tcl shell and do not require a specific tclsh version should use this new variable. The tclsh wrapper is installed on the system. The user can specify the desired tcl shell to use. WITH_TCL_VER User-defined variable that sets the desired Tcl version. UNIQUENAME_WITH_TCL_VER Like WITH_TCL_VER, but per-port. USE_TCL_THREADS Require a threaded build of Tcl/Tk. USE_TK The port depends on the Tk library (not the wish shell). Implies USE_TCL with the same value. For more information see the description of USE_TCL variable. USE_TK_BUILD Analog to the USE_TCL_BUILD variable. USE_TK_WRAPPER Analog to the USE_TCL_WRAPPER variable. WITH_TK_VER Analog to the WITH_TCL_VER variable and implies WITH_TCL_VER of the same value.
A complete list of available variables can be found in /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.tcl.mk. Using Emacs This section is yet to be written. Using Ruby Useful variables for ports that use Ruby Variable Description USE_RUBY The port requires Ruby. USE_RUBY_EXTCONF The port uses extconf.rb to configure. USE_RUBY_SETUP The port uses setup.rb to configure. RUBY_SETUP Set to the alternative name of setup.rb. Common value is install.rb.
The following table shows the selected variables available to port authors via the ports infrastructure. These variables should be used to install files into their proper locations. Use them in pkg-plist as much as possible. These variables should not be redefined in the port. Selected read-only variables for ports that use Ruby Variable Description Example value RUBY_PKGNAMEPREFIX Used as a PKGNAMEPREFIX to distinguish packages for different Ruby versions. ruby18- RUBY_VERSION Full version of Ruby in the form of x.y.z. 1.8.2 RUBY_SITELIBDIR Architecture independent libraries installation path. /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8 RUBY_SITEARCHLIBDIR Architecture dependent libraries installation path. /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/amd64-freebsd6 RUBY_MODDOCDIR Module documentation installation path. /usr/local/share/doc/ruby18/patsy RUBY_MODEXAMPLESDIR Module examples installation path. /usr/local/share/examples/ruby18/patsy
A complete list of available variables can be found in /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.ruby.mk. Using SDL The USE_SDL variable is used to autoconfigure the dependencies for ports which use an SDL based library like devel/sdl12 and x11-toolkits/sdl_gui. The following SDL libraries are recognized at the moment: sdl: devel/sdl12 gfx: graphics/sdl_gfx gui: x11-toolkits/sdl_gui image: graphics/sdl_image ldbad: devel/sdl_ldbad mixer: audio/sdl_mixer mm: devel/sdlmm net: net/sdl_net sound: audio/sdl_sound ttf: graphics/sdl_ttf Therefore, if a port has a dependency on net/sdl_net and audio/sdl_mixer, the syntax will be: USE_SDL= net mixer The dependency devel/sdl12, which is required by net/sdl_net and audio/sdl_mixer, is automatically added as well. If you use USE_SDL, it will automatically: Add a dependency on sdl12-config to BUILD_DEPENDS Add the variable SDL_CONFIG to CONFIGURE_ENV Add the dependencies of the selected libraries to the LIB_DEPENDS To check whether an SDL library is available, you can do it with the WANT_SDL variable: WANT_SDL=yes .include <bsd.port.pre.mk> .if ${HAVE_SDL:Mmixer}!="" USE_SDL+= mixer .endif .include <bsd.port.post.mk> Using <application>wxWidgets</application> This section describes the status of the wxWidgets libraries in the ports tree and its integration with the ports system. Introduction There are many versions of the wxWidgets libraries which conflict between them (install files under the same name). In the ports tree this problem has been solved by installing each version under a different name using version number suffixes. The obvious disadvantage of this is that each application has to be modified to find the expected version. Fortunately, most of the applications call the wx-config script to determine the necessary compiler and linker flags. The script is named differently for every available version. Majority of applications respect an environment variable, or accept a configure argument, to specify which wx-config script to call. Otherwise they have to be patched. Version selection To make your port use a specific version of wxWidgets there are two variables available for defining (if only one is defined the other will be set to a default value): Variables to select <application>wxWidgets</application> versions Variable Description Default value USE_WX List of versions the port can use All available versions USE_WX_NOT List of versions the port can not use None
The following is a list of available wxWidgets versions and the corresponding ports in the tree: Available <application>wxWidgets</application> versions Version Port 2.4 x11-toolkits/wxgtk24 2.6 x11-toolkits/wxgtk26 2.8 x11-toolkits/wxgtk28
The versions starting from 2.5 also come in Unicode version and are installed by a slave port named like the normal one plus a -unicode suffix, but this can be handled with variables (see ). The variables in can be set to one or more of the following combinations separated by spaces: <application>wxWidgets</application> version specifications Description Example Single version 2.4 Ascending range 2.4+ Descending range 2.6- Full range (must be ascending) 2.4-2.6
There are also some variables to select the preferred versions from the available ones. They can be set to a list of versions, the first ones will have higher priority. Variables to select preferred <application>wxWidgets</application> versions Name Designed for WANT_WX_VER the port WITH_WX_VER the user
Component selection There are other applications that, while not being wxWidgets libraries, are related to them. These applications can be specified in the WX_COMPS variable. The following components are available: Available <application>wxWidgets</application> components Name Description Version restriction wx main library none contrib contributed libraries none python wxPython (Python bindings) 2.4-2.6 mozilla wxMozilla 2.4 svg wxSVG 2.6
The dependency type can be selected for each component by adding a suffix separated by a semicolon. If not present then a default type will be used (see ). The following types are available: Available <application>wxWidgets</application> dependency types Name Description build Component is required for building, equivalent to BUILD_DEPENDS run Component is required for running, equivalent to RUN_DEPENDS lib Component is required for building and running, equivalent to LIB_DEPENDS
The default values for the components are detailed in the following table: Default <application>wxWidgets</application> dependency types Component Dependency type wx lib contrib lib python run mozilla lib svg lib
Selecting <application>wxWidgets</application> components The following fragment corresponds to a port which uses wxWidgets version 2.4 and its contributed libraries. USE_WX= 2.4 WX_COMPS= wx contrib Unicode The wxWidgets library supports Unicode since version 2.5. In the ports tree both versions are available and can be selected with the following variables: Variables to select Unicode in <application>wxWidgets</application> versions Variable Description Designed for WX_UNICODE The port works only with the Unicode version the port WANT_UNICODE The port works with both versions but prefers the Unicode one the port WITH_UNICODE The port will use the Unicode version the user WITHOUT_UNICODE The port will use the normal version if supported (when WX_UNICODE is not defined) the user
Do not use WX_UNICODE for ports that can use both Unicode and normal versions. If you want the port to use Unicode by default define WANT_UNICODE instead. Detecting installed versions To detect an installed version you have to define WANT_WX. If you do not set it to a specific version then the components will have a version suffix. The HAVE_WX variable will be filled after detection. Detecting installed <application>wxWidgets</application> versions and components The following fragment can be used in a port that uses wxWidgets if it is installed, or an option is selected. WANT_WX= yes .include <bsd.port.pre.mk> .if defined(WITH_WX) || ${HAVE_WX:Mwx-2.4} != "" USE_WX= 2.4 CONFIGURE_ARGS+=--enable-wx .endif The following fragment can be used in a port that enables wxPython support if it is installed or if an option is selected, in addition to wxWidgets, both version 2.6. USE_WX= 2.6 WX_COMPS= wx WANT_WX= 2.6 .include <bsd.port.pre.mk> .if defined(WITH_WXPYTHON) || ${HAVE_WX:Mpython} != "" WX_COMPS+= python CONFIGURE_ARGS+=--enable-wxpython .endif Defined variables The following variables are available in the port (after defining one from ). Variables defined for ports that use <application>wxWidgets</application> Name Description WX_CONFIG The path to the wxWidgets wx-config script (with different name) WXRC_CMD The path to the wxWidgets wxrc program (with different name) WX_VERSION The wxWidgets version that is going to be used (e.g., 2.6) WX_UNICODE If not defined but Unicode is going to be used then it will be defined
Processing in <filename>bsd.port.pre.mk</filename> If you need to use the variables for running commands right after including bsd.port.pre.mk you need to define WX_PREMK. If you define WX_PREMK, then the version, dependencies, components and defined variables will not change if you modify the wxWidgets port variables after including bsd.port.pre.mk. Using <application>wxWidgets</application> variables in commands The following fragment illustrates the use of WX_PREMK by running the wx-config script to obtain the full version string, assign it to a variable and pass it to the program. USE_WX= 2.4 WX_PREMK= yes .include <bsd.port.pre.mk> .if exists(${WX_CONFIG}) VER_STR!= ${WX_CONFIG} --release PLIST_SUB+= VERSION="${VER_STR}" .endif The wxWidgets variables can be safely used in commands when they are inside targets without the need of WX_PREMK. Additional <command>configure</command> arguments Some GNU configure scripts can not find wxWidgets with just the WX_CONFIG environment variable set, requiring additional arguments. The WX_CONF_ARGS variable can be used for provide them. Legal values for <makevar>WX_CONF_ARGS</makevar> Possible value Resulting argument absolute --with-wx-config=${WX_CONFIG} relative --with-wx=${LOCALBASE} --with-wx-config=${WX_CONFIG:T}
Using <application>Lua</application> This section describes the status of the Lua libraries in the ports tree and its integration with the ports system. Introduction There are many versions of the Lua libraries and corresponding interpreters, which conflict between them (install files under the same name). In the ports tree this problem has been solved by installing each version under a different name using version number suffixes. The obvious disadvantage of this is that each application has to be modified to find the expected version. But it can be solved by adding some additional flags to the compiler and linker. Version selection To make your port use a specific version of Lua there are two variables available for defining (if only one is defined the other will be set to a default value): Variables to select <application>Lua</application> versions Variable Description Default value USE_LUA List of versions the port can use All available versions USE_LUA_NOT List of versions the port can not use None
The following is a list of available Lua versions and the corresponding ports in the tree: Available <application>Lua</application> versions Version Port 4.0 lang/lua4 5.0 lang/lua50 5.1 lang/lua
The variables in can be set to one or more of the following combinations separated by spaces: <application>Lua</application> version specifications Description Example Single version 4.0 Ascending range 5.0+ Descending range 5.0- Full range (must be ascending) 5.0-5.1
There are also some variables to select the preferred versions from the available ones. They can be set to a list of versions, the first ones will have higher priority. Variables to select preferred <application>Lua</application> versions Name Designed for WANT_LUA_VER the port WITH_LUA_VER the user
Selecting the <application>Lua</application> version The following fragment is from a port which can use Lua version 5.0 or 5.1, and uses 5.0 by default. It can be overriden by the user using WITH_LUA_VER. USE_LUA= 5.0-5.1 WANT_LUA_VER= 5.0 Component selection There are other applications that, while not being Lua libraries, are related to them. These applications can be specified in the LUA_COMPS variable. The following components are available: Available <application>Lua</application> components Name Description Version restriction lua main library none tolua - Library for accesing C/C++ code + Library for accessing C/C++ code 4.0-5.0 ruby Ruby bindings 4.0-5.0
There are more components but they are modules for the interpreter, not used by applications (only by other modules). The dependency type can be selected for each component by adding a suffix separated by a semicolon. If not present then a default type will be used (see ). The following types are available: Available <application>Lua</application> dependency types Name Description build Component is required for building, equivalent to BUILD_DEPENDS run Component is required for running, equivalent to RUN_DEPENDS lib Component is required for building and running, equivalent to LIB_DEPENDS
The default values for the components are detailed in the following table: Default <application>Lua</application> dependency types Component Dependency type lua lib for 4.0-5.0 (shared) and build for 5.1 (static) tolua build (static) ruby lib (shared)
Selecting <application>Lua</application> components The following fragment corresponds to a port which uses Lua version 4.0 and its Ruby bindings. USE_LUA= 4.0 LUA_COMPS= lua ruby Detecting installed versions To detect an installed version you have to define WANT_LUA. If you do not set it to a specific version then the components will have a version suffix. The HAVE_LUA variable will be filled after detection. Detecting installed <application>Lua</application> versions and components The following fragment can be used in a port that uses Lua if it is installed, or an option is selected. WANT_LUA= yes .include <bsd.port.pre.mk> .if defined(WITH_LUA5) || ${HAVE_LUA:Mlua-5.[01]} != "" USE_LUA= 5.0-5.1 CONFIGURE_ARGS+=--enable-lua5 .endif The following fragment can be used in a port that enables tolua support if it is installed or if an option is selected, in addition to Lua, both version 4.0. USE_LUA= 4.0 LUA_COMPS= lua WANT_LUA= 4.0 .include <bsd.port.pre.mk> .if defined(WITH_TOLUA) || ${HAVE_LUA:Mtolua} != "" LUA_COMPS+= tolua CONFIGURE_ARGS+=--enable-tolua .endif Defined variables The following variables are available in the port (after defining one from ). Variables defined for ports that use <application>Lua</application> Name Description LUA_VER The Lua version that is going to be used (e.g., 5.1) LUA_VER_SH The Lua shared library major version (e.g., 1) LUA_VER_STR The Lua version without the dots (e.g., 51) LUA_PREFIX The prefix where Lua (and components) is installed LUA_SUBDIR The directory under ${PREFIX}/bin, ${PREFIX}/share and ${PREFIX}/lib where Lua is installed LUA_INCDIR The directory where Lua and tolua header files are installed LUA_LIBDIR The directory where Lua and tolua libraries are installed LUA_MODLIBDIR The directory where Lua module libraries (.so) are installed LUA_MODSHAREDIR The directory where Lua modules (.lua) are installed LUA_PKGNAMEPREFIX The package name prefix used by Lua modules LUA_CMD The path to the Lua interpreter LUAC_CMD The path to the Lua compiler TOLUA_CMD The path to the tolua program
Telling the port where to find <application>Lua</application> The following fragment shows how to tell a port that uses a configure script where the Lua header files and libraries are. USE_LUA= 4.0 GNU_CONFIGURE= yes CONFIGURE_ENV= CPPFLAGS="-I${LUA_INCDIR}" LDFLAGS="-L${LUA_LIBDIR}" Processing in <filename>bsd.port.pre.mk</filename> If you need to use the variables for running commands right after including bsd.port.pre.mk you need to define LUA_PREMK. If you define LUA_PREMK, then the version, dependencies, components and defined variables will not change if you modify the Lua port variables after including bsd.port.pre.mk. Using <application>Lua</application> variables in commands The following fragment illustrates the use of LUA_PREMK by running the Lua interpreter to obtain the full version string, assign it to a variable and pass it to the program. USE_LUA= 5.0 LUA_PREMK= yes .include <bsd.port.pre.mk> .if exists(${LUA_CMD}) VER_STR!= ${LUA_CMD} -v CFLAGS+= -DLUA_VERSION_STRING="${VER_STR}" .endif The Lua variables can be safely used in commands when they are inside targets without the need of LUA_PREMK. Using Xfce The USE_XFCE variable is used to autoconfigure the dependencies for ports which use an Xfce based library or application like x11-toolkits/libxfce4gui and x11-wm/xfce4-panel. The following Xfce libraries and applications are recognized at the moment: libexo: x11/libexo libgui: x11-toolkits/libxfce4gui libutil: x11/libxfce4util libmcs: x11/libxfce4mcs mcsmanager: sysutils/xfce4-mcs-manager panel: x11-wm/xfce4-panel thunar: x11-fm/thunar wm: x11-wm/xfce4-wm xfdev: dev/xfce4-dev-tools The following additional parameters are recognized: configenv: Use this if your port requires a special modified CONFIGURE_ENV to find it's required libraries. -I${LOCALBASE}/include -L${LOCALBASE}/lib gets added to CPPFLAGS to CONFIGURE_ENV. Therefore, if a port has a dependency on sysutils/xfce4-mcs-manager and requires the special CPPFLAGS in its configure environment, the syntax will be: USE_XFCE= mcsmanager configenv Using databases Variables for ports using databases Variable Means USE_BDB If variable is set to yes, add dependency on databases/db41 port. The variable may also be set to values: 2, 3, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, or 47. You can declare a range of acceptable values, USE_BDB=42+ will find the highest installed version, and fall back to 42 if nothing else is installed. USE_MYSQL If variable is set to yes, add dependency on databases/mysql50-server port. An associated variable, WANT_MYSQL_VER, may be set to values such as 323, 40, 41, 50, 51 or 60. USE_PGSQL If set to yes, add dependency on databases/postgresql82 port. An associated variable, WANT_PGSQL_VER, may be set to values such as 73, 74, 80, 81, 82, or 83.
Starting and stopping services (rc scripts) rc.d scripts are used to start services on system startup, and to give administrators a standard way of stopping, starting and restarting the service. Ports integrate into the system rc.d framework. Details on its usage can be found in the rc.d Handbook chapter. Detailed explanation of available commands is provided in &man.rc.8; and &man.rc.subr.8;. Finally, there is an article on practical aspects of rc.d scripting. One or more rc.d scripts can be installed: USE_RC_SUBR= doormand Scripts must be placed in the files subdirectory and a .in suffix must be added to their filename. Standard SUB_LIST expansions will be used for this file. Use of the %%PREFIX%% and %%LOCALBASE%% expansions is strongly encouraged as well. More on SUB_LIST in the relevant section. Prior to &os; 6.1-RELEASE, integration with &man.rcorder.8; is available by using USE_RCORDER instead of USE_RC_SUBR. However, use of this method is not necessary unless the port has an option to install itself in the base, or the service needs to run prior to the FILESYSTEMS rc.d script in the base. As of &os; 6.1-RELEASE, local rc.d scripts (including those installed by ports) are included in the overall &man.rcorder.8; of the base system. Example simple rc.d script: #!/bin/sh # $FreeBSD$ # # PROVIDE: doormand # REQUIRE: LOGIN # KEYWORD: shutdown # # Add the following lines to /etc/rc.conf.local or /etc/rc.conf # to enable this service: # # doormand_enable (bool): Set to NO by default. # Set it to YES to enable doormand. # doormand_config (path): Set to %%PREFIX%%/etc/doormand/doormand.cf # by default. # . /etc/rc.subr name="doormand" rcvar=${name}_enable command=%%PREFIX%%/sbin/${name} pidfile=/var/run/${name}.pid load_rc_config $name : ${doormand_enable="NO"} : ${doormand_config="%%PREFIX%%/etc/doormand/doormand.cf"} command_args="-p $pidfile -f $doormand_config" run_rc_command "$1" Unless there is a good reason to start the service earlier all ports scripts should use REQUIRE: LOGIN If the service runs as a particular user (other than root) this is mandatory. KEYWORD: shutdown is included in the script above because the mythical port we are using as an example starts a service, and should be shut down cleanly when the system shuts down. If the script is not starting a persistent service this is not necessary. The "=" style of default variable assignment is preferable to the ":=" style here, since the former sets a default value only if the variable is unset, and the latter sets one if the variable is unset or null. A user might very well include something like doormand_flags="" in their rc.conf.local file, and a variable substitution using ":=" would inappropriately override the user's intention. No new scripts should be added with the .sh suffix. At some point there will be a mass repocopy of all the scripts that still have that suffix. Stopping services at deinstall It is possible to have a service stopped automatically as part of the deinstall routine. We advise using this feature only when it's absolutely necessary to stop a service before it's files go away. Usually, it's up to the administrator's discretion to decide, whether to stop the service on deinstall or not. Also note this affects upgrades, too. Line like this goes to the pkg-plist: @stopdaemon doormand The argument must match the content of USE_RC_SUBR variable. Adding users and groups Some ports require a certain user to be on the installed system. Choose a free UID from 50 to 999 and register it either in ports/UIDs (for users) or in ports/GIDs (for groups). Make sure you do not use a UID already used by the system or other ports. Please include a patch against these two files when you require a new user or group to be created for your port. Then you can use USERS and GROUPS variables in your Makefile, and the user will be automatically created when installing the port. USERS= pulse GROUPS= pulse pulse-access pulse-rt The current list of reserved UIDs and GIDs can be found in ports/UIDs and ports/GIDs. Advanced <filename>pkg-plist</filename> practices Changing <filename>pkg-plist</filename> based on make variables Some ports, particularly the p5- ports, need to change their pkg-plist depending on what options they are configured with (or version of perl, in the case of p5- ports). To make this easy, any instances in the pkg-plist of %%OSREL%%, %%PERL_VER%%, and %%PERL_VERSION%% will be substituted for appropriately. The value of %%OSREL%% is the numeric revision of the operating system (e.g., 4.9). %%PERL_VERSION%% and %%PERL_VER%% is the full version number of perl (e.g., 5.8.9). Several other %%VARS%% related to port's documentation files are described in the relevant section. If you need to make other substitutions, you can set the PLIST_SUB variable with a list of VAR=VALUE pairs and instances of %%VAR%% will be substituted with VALUE in the pkg-plist. For instance, if you have a port that installs many files in a version-specific subdirectory, you can put something like OCTAVE_VERSION= 2.0.13 PLIST_SUB= OCTAVE_VERSION=${OCTAVE_VERSION} in the Makefile and use %%OCTAVE_VERSION%% wherever the version shows up in pkg-plist. That way, when you upgrade the port, you will not have to change dozens (or in some cases, hundreds) of lines in the pkg-plist. If your port installs files conditionally on the options set in the port, the usual way of handling it is prefixing the pkg-plist lines with a %%TAG%% and adding that TAG to the PLIST_SUB variable inside the Makefile with a special value of @comment, which makes package tools to ignore the line: .if defined(WITH_X11) PLIST_SUB+= X11="" .else PLIST_SUB+= X11="@comment " .endif and in the pkg-plist: %%X11%%bin/foo-gui This substitution (as well as addition of any manual pages) will be done between the pre-install and do-install targets, by reading from PLIST and writing to TMPPLIST (default: WRKDIR/.PLIST.mktmp). So if your port builds PLIST on the fly, do so in or before pre-install. Also, if your port needs to edit the resulting file, do so in post-install to a file named TMPPLIST. Another possibility to modify port's packing list is based on setting the variables PLIST_FILES and PLIST_DIRS. The value of each variable is regarded as a list of pathnames to write to TMPPLIST along with PLIST contents. Names listed in PLIST_FILES and PLIST_DIRS are subject to %%VAR%% substitution, as described above. Except for that, names from PLIST_FILES will appear in the final packing list unchanged, while @dirrm will be prepended to names from PLIST_DIRS. To take effect, PLIST_FILES and PLIST_DIRS must be set before TMPPLIST is written, i.e. in pre-install or earlier. Empty directories Cleaning up empty directories Do make your ports remove empty directories when they are de-installed. This is usually accomplished by adding @dirrm lines for all directories that are specifically created by the port. You need to delete subdirectories before you can delete parent directories. : lib/X11/oneko/pixmaps/cat.xpm lib/X11/oneko/sounds/cat.au : @dirrm lib/X11/oneko/pixmaps @dirrm lib/X11/oneko/sounds @dirrm lib/X11/oneko However, sometimes @dirrm will give you errors because other ports share the same directory. You can use @dirrmtry to remove only empty directories without warning. @dirrmtry share/doc/gimp This will neither print any error messages nor cause &man.pkg.delete.1; to exit abnormally even if ${PREFIX}/share/doc/gimp is not empty due to other ports installing some files in there. Creating empty directories Empty directories created during port installation need special attention. They will not get created when installing the package, because packages only store the files, and &man.pkg.add.1; creates directories for them as needed. To make sure the empty directory is created when installing the package, add this line to pkg-plist above the corresponding @dirrm line: @exec mkdir -p %D/share/foo/templates Configuration files If your port requires some configuration files in PREFIX/etc, do not just install them and list them in pkg-plist. That will cause &man.pkg.delete.1; to delete files carefully edited by the user and a new installation to wipe them out. Instead, install sample files with a suffix (filename.sample will work well). Copy the sample file as the real configuration file, if it does not exist. On deinstall, delete the configuration file, but only if it was not modified by the user. You need to handle this both in the port Makefile, and in the pkg-plist (for installation from the package). Example of the Makefile part: post-install: @if [ ! -f ${PREFIX}/etc/orbit.conf ]; then \ ${CP} -p ${PREFIX}/etc/orbit.conf.sample ${PREFIX}/etc/orbit.conf ; \ fi Example of the pkg-plist part: @unexec if cmp -s %D/etc/orbit.conf.sample %D/etc/orbit.conf; then rm -f %D/etc/orbit.conf; fi etc/orbit.conf.sample @exec if [ ! -f %D/etc/orbit.conf ] ; then cp -p %D/%F %B/orbit.conf; fi Alternatively, print out a message pointing out that the user has to copy and edit the file before the software can be made to work. Dynamic vs. static package list A static package list is a package list which is available in the Ports Collection either as a pkg-plist file (with or without variable substitution), or embedded into the Makefile via PLIST_FILES and PLIST_DIRS. Even if the contents are auto-generated by a tool or a target in the Makefile before the inclusion into the Ports Collection by a committer, this is still considered a static list, since it is possible to examine it without having to download or compile the distfile. A dynamic package list is a package list which is generated at the time the port is compiled based upon the files and directories which are installed. It is not possible to examine it before the source code of the ported application is downloaded and compiled, or after running a make clean. While the use of dynamic package lists is not forbidden, maintainers should use static package lists wherever possible, as it enables users to &man.grep.1; through available ports to discover, for example, which port installs a certain file. Dynamic lists should be primarily used for complex ports where the package list changes drastically based upon optional features of the port (and thus maintaining a static package list is infeasible), or ports which change the package list based upon the version of dependent software used (e.g. ports which generate docs with Javadoc). Maintainers who prefer dynamic package lists are encouraged to add a new target to their port which generates the pkg-plist file so that users may examine the contents. Automated package list creation First, make sure your port is almost complete, with only pkg-plist missing. Next, create a temporary directory tree into which your port can be installed, and install any dependencies. &prompt.root; mkdir /var/tmp/$(make -V PORTNAME) &prompt.root; mtree -U -f $(make -V MTREE_FILE) -d -e -p /var/tmp/$(make -V PORTNAME) &prompt.root; make depends PREFIX=/var/tmp/$(make -V PORTNAME) Store the directory structure in a new file. &prompt.root; (cd /var/tmp/$(make -V PORTNAME) && find -d * -type d) | sort > OLD-DIRS Create an empty pkg-plist file: &prompt.root; :>pkg-plist If your port honors PREFIX (which it should) you can then install the port and create the package list. &prompt.root; make install PREFIX=/var/tmp/$(make -V PORTNAME) &prompt.root; (cd /var/tmp/$(make -V PORTNAME) && find -d * \! -type d) | sort > pkg-plist You must also add any newly created directories to the packing list. &prompt.root; (cd /var/tmp/$(make -V PORTNAME) && find -d * -type d) | sort | comm -13 OLD-DIRS - | sort -r | sed -e 's#^#@dirrm #' >> pkg-plist Finally, you need to tidy up the packing list by hand; it is not all automated. Manual pages should be listed in the port's Makefile under MANn, and not in the package list. User configuration files should be removed, or installed as filename.sample. The info/dir file should not be listed and appropriate install-info lines should be added as noted in the info files section. Any libraries installed by the port should be listed as specified in the shared libraries section. Alternatively, use the plist script in /usr/ports/Tools/scripts/ to build the package list automatically. The plist script is a Ruby script that automates most of the manual steps outlined in the previous paragraphs. The first step is the same as above: take the first three lines, that is, mkdir, mtree and make depends. Then build and install the port: &prompt.root; make install PREFIX=/var/tmp/$(make -V PORTNAME) And let plist create the pkg-plist file: &prompt.root; /usr/ports/Tools/scripts/plist -Md -m $(make -V MTREE_FILE) /var/tmp/$(make -V PORTNAME) > pkg-plist The packing list still has to be tidied up by hand as stated above. Another tool that might be used to create an initial pkg-plist is ports-mgmt/genplist. As with any automated tool, the resulting pkg-plist should be checked and manually edited as needed. The <filename>pkg-<replaceable>*</replaceable></filename> files There are some tricks we have not mentioned yet about the pkg-* files that come in handy sometimes. <filename>pkg-message</filename> If you need to display a message to the installer, you may place the message in pkg-message. This capability is often useful to display additional installation steps to be taken after a &man.pkg.add.1; or to display licensing information. When some lines about the build-time knobs or warnings have to be displayed, use ECHO_MSG. The pkg-message file is only for post-installation steps. Likewise, the distinction between ECHO_MSG and ECHO_CMD should be kept in mind. The former is for printing informational text to the screen, while the latter is for command pipelining. A good example for both can be found in shells/bash2/Makefile: update-etc-shells: @${ECHO_MSG} "updating /etc/shells" @${CP} /etc/shells /etc/shells.bak @( ${GREP} -v ${PREFIX}/bin/bash /etc/shells.bak; \ ${ECHO_CMD} ${PREFIX}/bin/bash) >/etc/shells @${RM} /etc/shells.bak The pkg-message file does not need to be added to pkg-plist. Also, it will not get automatically printed if the user is using the port, not the package, so you should probably display it from the post-install target yourself. <filename>pkg-install</filename> If your port needs to execute commands when the binary package is installed with &man.pkg.add.1; you can do this via the pkg-install script. This script will automatically be added to the package, and will be run twice by &man.pkg.add.1;: the first time as ${SH} pkg-install ${PKGNAME} PRE-INSTALL and the second time as ${SH} pkg-install ${PKGNAME} POST-INSTALL. $2 can be tested to determine which mode the script is being run in. The PKG_PREFIX environmental variable will be set to the package installation directory. See &man.pkg.add.1; for additional information. This script is not run automatically if you install the port with make install. If you are depending on it being run, you will have to explicitly call it from your port's Makefile, with a line like PKG_PREFIX=${PREFIX} ${SH} ${PKGINSTALL} ${PKGNAME} PRE-INSTALL. <filename>pkg-deinstall</filename> This script executes when a package is removed. This script will be run twice by &man.pkg.delete.1;. The first time as ${SH} pkg-deinstall ${PKGNAME} DEINSTALL and the second time as ${SH} pkg-deinstall ${PKGNAME} POST-DEINSTALL. <filename>pkg-req</filename> If your port needs to determine if it should install or not, you can create a pkg-req requirements script. It will be invoked automatically at installation/de-installation time to determine whether or not installation/de-installation should proceed. The script will be run at installation time by &man.pkg.add.1; as pkg-req ${PKGNAME} INSTALL. At de-installation time it will be run by &man.pkg.delete.1; as pkg-req ${PKGNAME} DEINSTALL. Changing the names of <filename>pkg-<replaceable>*</replaceable></filename> files All the names of pkg-* files are defined using variables so you can change them in your Makefile if need be. This is especially useful when you are sharing the same pkg-* files among several ports or have to write to one of the above files (see writing to places other than WRKDIR for why it is a bad idea to write directly into the pkg-* subdirectory). Here is a list of variable names and their default values. (PKGDIR defaults to ${MASTERDIR}.) Variable Default value DESCR ${PKGDIR}/pkg-descr PLIST ${PKGDIR}/pkg-plist PKGINSTALL ${PKGDIR}/pkg-install PKGDEINSTALL ${PKGDIR}/pkg-deinstall PKGREQ ${PKGDIR}/pkg-req PKGMESSAGE ${PKGDIR}/pkg-message Please change these variables rather than overriding PKG_ARGS. If you change PKG_ARGS, those files will not correctly be installed in /var/db/pkg upon install from a port. Making use of <makevar>SUB_FILES</makevar> and <makevar>SUB_LIST</makevar> The SUB_FILES and SUB_LIST variables are useful for dynamic values in port files, such as the installation PREFIX in pkg-message. The SUB_FILES variable specifies a list of files to be automatically modified. Each file in the SUB_FILES list must have a corresponding file.in present in FILESDIR. A modified version will be created in WRKDIR. Files defined as a value of USE_RC_SUBR (or the deprecated USE_RCORDER) are automatically added to the SUB_FILES. For the files pkg-message, pkg-install, pkg-deinstall and pkg-reg, the corresponding Makefile variable is automatically set to point to the processed version. The SUB_LIST variable is a list of VAR=VALUE pairs. For each pair %%VAR%% will get replaced with VALUE in each file listed in SUB_FILES. Several common pairs are automatically defined: PREFIX, LOCALBASE, DATADIR, DOCSDIR, EXAMPLESDIR. Any line beginning with @comment will be deleted from resulting files after a variable substitution. The following example will replace %%ARCH%% with the system architecture in a pkg-message: SUB_FILES= pkg-message SUB_LIST= ARCH=${ARCH} Note that for this example, the pkg-message.in file must exist in FILESDIR. Example of a good pkg-message.in: Now it is time to configure this package. Copy %%PREFIX%%/share/examples/putsy/%%ARCH%%.conf into your home directory as .putsy.conf and edit it. Testing your port Running <command>make describe</command> Several of the &os; port maintenance tools, such as &man.portupgrade.1;, rely on a database called /usr/ports/INDEX which keeps track of such items as port dependencies. INDEX is created by the top-level ports/Makefile via make index, which descends into each port subdirectory and executes make describe there. Thus, if make describe fails in any port, no one can generate INDEX, and many people will quickly become unhappy. It is important to be able to generate this file no matter what options are present in make.conf, so please avoid doing things such as using .error statements when (for instance) a dependency is not satisfied. (See .) If make describe produces a string rather than an error message, you are probably safe. See bsd.port.mk for the meaning of the string produced. Also note that running a recent version of portlint (as specified in the next section) will cause make describe to be run automatically. Portlint Do check your work with portlint before you submit or commit it. portlint warns you about many common errors, both functional and stylistic. For a new (or repocopied) port, portlint -A is the most thorough; for an existing port, portlint -C is sufficient. Since portlint uses heuristics to try to figure out errors, it can produce false positive warnings. In addition, occasionally something that is flagged as a problem really cannot be done in any other way due to limitations in the ports framework. When in doubt, the best thing to do is ask on &a.ports;. Port Tools The ports-mgmt/porttools program is part of the Ports Collection. port is the front-end script, which can help you simplify the testing job. Whenever you want to test a new port or update an existing one, you can use port test to test your port, including the portlint checking. This command also detects and lists any files that are not listed in pkg-plist. See the following example: &prompt.root; port test /usr/ports/net/csup <makevar>PREFIX</makevar> and <makevar>DESTDIR</makevar> PREFIX determines the location where the port will install. It is usually /usr/local or /opt, but can be set to a custom path. Your port must respect this variable. DESTDIR, if set by user, determines the complete alternative environment, usually a jail, or an installed system mounted elsewhere than /. A port will actually install into DESTDIR/PREFIX, and register with the package database in DESTDIR/var/db/pkg. As DESTDIR is handled automatically by the ports infrastructure via calling &man.chroot.8;, you do not need any modifications or any extra care to write DESTDIR-compliant ports. The value of PREFIX will be set to LOCALBASE (default /usr/local). If USE_LINUX_PREFIX is set, PREFIX will be LINUXBASE (default /compat/linux). Avoiding the hard-coding of /usr/local or /usr/X11R6 anywhere in the source will make the port much more flexible and able to cater to the needs of other sites. For X ports that use imake, this is automatic; otherwise, this can often be done by simply replacing the occurrences of /usr/local (or /usr/X11R6 for X ports that do not use imake) in the various Makefiles in the port to read ${PREFIX}, as this variable is automatically passed down to every stage of the build and install processes. Make sure your application is not installing things in /usr/local instead of PREFIX. A quick test for this is to do this is: &prompt.root; make clean; make package PREFIX=/var/tmp/$(make -V PORTNAME) If anything is installed outside of PREFIX, the package creation process will complain that it cannot find the files. This does not test for the existence of internal references, or correct use of LOCALBASE for references to files from other ports. Testing the installation in /var/tmp/$(make -V PORTNAME) to do that while you have it installed would do that. The variable PREFIX can be reassigned in your Makefile or in the user's environment. However, it is strongly discouraged for individual ports to set this variable explicitly in the Makefiles. Also, refer to programs/files from other ports with the variables mentioned above, not explicit pathnames. For instance, if your port requires a macro PAGER to be the full pathname of less, use the compiler flag: -DPAGER=\"${LOCALBASE}/bin/less\" instead of -DPAGER=\"/usr/local/bin/less\". This way it will have a better chance of working if the system administrator has moved the whole /usr/local tree somewhere else. Tinderbox If you're an avid ports contributor, you might want to take a look at Tinderbox. It is a powerful system for building and testing ports based on the scripts used on Pointyhat. You can install Tinderbox using ports-mgmt/tinderbox port. Be sure to read supplied documentation since the configuration is not trivial. Visit the Tinderbox website for more details. Upgrading When you notice that a port is out of date compared to the latest version from the original authors, you should first ensure that you have the latest port. You can find them in the ports/ports-current directory of the &os; FTP mirror sites. However, if you are working with more than a few ports, you will probably find it easier to use CVSup to keep your whole ports collection up-to-date, as described in the Handbook. This will have the added benefit of tracking all the ports' dependencies. The next step is to see if there is an update already pending. To do this, you have two options. There is a searchable interface to the FreeBSD Problem Report (PR) database (also known as GNATS). Select ports in the dropdown, and enter the name of the port. However, sometimes people forget to put the name of the port into the Synopsis field in an unambiguous fashion. In that case, you can try the FreeBSD Ports Monitoring System (also known as portsmon). This system attempts to classify port PRs by portname. To search for PRs about a particular port, use the Overview of One Port. If there is no pending PR, the next step is to send an email to the port's maintainer, as shown by make maintainer. That person may already be working on an upgrade, or have a reason to not upgrade the port right now (because of, for example, stability problems of the new version); you would not want to duplicate their work. Note that unmaintained ports are listed with a maintainer of ports@FreeBSD.org, which is just the general ports mailing list, so sending mail there probably will not help in this case. If the maintainer asks you to do the upgrade or there is no maintainer, then you have a chance to help out &os; by preparing the update yourself! Please make the changes and save the result of the recursive diff output of the new and old ports directories (e.g., if your modified port directory is called superedit and the original is in our tree as superedit.bak, then save the result of diff -ruN superedit.bak superedit). Either unified or context diff is fine, but port committers generally prefer unified diffs. Note the use of the -N option—this is the accepted way to force diff to properly deal with the case of new files being added or old files being deleted. Before sending us the diff, please examine the output to make sure all the changes make sense. To simplify common operations with patch files, you can use /usr/ports/Tools/scripts/patchtool.py. Before using it, please read /usr/ports/Tools/scripts/README.patchtool. If the port is unmaintained, and you are actively using it yourself, please consider volunteering to become its maintainer. &os; has over 4000 ports without maintainers, and this is an area where more volunteers are always needed. (For a detailed description of the responsibilities of maintainers, refer to the section in the Developer's Handbook.) The best way to send us the diff is by including it via &man.send-pr.1; (category ports). If you are maintaining the port, be sure to put [maintainer update] at the beginning of your synopsis line and set the Class of your PR to maintainer-update. Otherwise, the Class of your PR should be change-request. Please mention any added or deleted files in the message, as they have to be explicitly specified to &man.cvs.1; when doing a commit. If the diff is more than about 20KB, please compress and uuencode it; otherwise, just include it in the PR as is. Before you &man.send-pr.1;, you should review the Writing the problem report section in the Problem Reports article; it contains far more information about how to write useful problem reports. If your upgrade is motivated by security concerns or a serious fault in the currently committed port, please notify the &a.portmgr; to request immediate rebuilding and redistribution of your port's package. Unsuspecting users of &man.pkg.add.1; will otherwise continue to install the old version via pkg_add -r for several weeks. Once again, please use &man.diff.1; and not &man.shar.1; to send updates to existing ports! Now that you have done all that, you will want to read about how to keep up-to-date in . Ports security Why security is so important Bugs are occasionally introduced to the software. Arguably, the most dangerous of them are those opening security vulnerabilities. From the technical viewpoint, such vulnerabilities are to be closed by exterminating the bugs that caused them. However, the policies for handling mere bugs and security vulnerabilities are very different. A typical small bug affects only those users who have enabled some combination of options triggering the bug. The developer will eventually release a patch followed by a new version of the software, free of the bug, but the majority of users will not take the trouble of upgrading immediately because the bug has never vexed them. A critical bug that may cause data loss represents a graver issue. Nevertheless, prudent users know that a lot of possible accidents, besides software bugs, are likely to lead to data loss, and so they make backups of important data; in addition, a critical bug will be discovered really soon. A security vulnerability is all different. First, it may remain unnoticed for years because often it does not cause software malfunction. Second, a malicious party can use it to gain unauthorized access to a vulnerable system, to destroy or alter sensitive data; and in the worst case the user will not even notice the harm caused. Third, exposing a vulnerable system often assists attackers to break into other systems that could not be compromised otherwise. Therefore closing a vulnerability alone is not enough: the audience should be notified of it in most clear and comprehensive manner, which will allow to evaluate the danger and take appropriate actions. Fixing security vulnerabilities While on the subject of ports and packages, a security vulnerability may initially appear in the original distribution or in the port files. In the former case, the original software developer is likely to release a patch or a new version instantly, and you will only need to update the port promptly with respect to the author's fix. If the fix is delayed for some reason, you should either mark the port as FORBIDDEN or introduce a patch file of your own to the port. In the case of a vulnerable port, just fix the port as soon as possible. In either case, the standard procedure for submitting your change should be followed unless you have rights to commit it directly to the ports tree. Being a ports committer is not enough to commit to an arbitrary port. Remember that ports usually have maintainers, whom you should respect. Please make sure that the port's revision is bumped as soon as the vulnerability has been closed. That is how the users who upgrade installed packages on a regular basis will see they need to run an update. Besides, a new package will be built and distributed over FTP and WWW mirrors, replacing the vulnerable one. PORTREVISION should be bumped unless PORTVERSION has changed in the course of correcting the vulnerability. That is you should bump PORTREVISION if you have added a patch file to the port, but you should not if you have updated the port to the latest software version and thus already touched PORTVERSION. Please refer to the corresponding section for more information. Keeping the community informed The VuXML database A very important and urgent step to take as early as a security vulnerability is discovered is to notify the community of port users about the jeopardy. Such notification serves two purposes. First, should the danger be really severe, it will be wise to apply an instant workaround, e.g., stop the affected network service or even deinstall the port completely, until the vulnerability is closed. Second, a lot of users tend to upgrade installed packages just occasionally. They will know from the notification that they must update the package without delay as soon as a corrected version is available. Given the huge number of ports in the tree, a security advisory cannot be issued on each incident without creating a flood and losing the attention of the audience by the time it comes to really serious matters. Therefore security vulnerabilities found in ports are recorded in the FreeBSD VuXML database. The Security Officer Team members are monitoring it for issues requiring their intervention. If you have committer rights, you can update the VuXML database by yourself. So you will both help the Security Officer Team and deliver the crucial information to the community earlier. However, if you are not a committer, or you believe you have found an exceptionally severe vulnerability, or whatever, please do not hesitate to contact the Security Officer Team directly as described on the FreeBSD Security Information page. All right, you elected the hard way. As it may be obvious from its title, the VuXML database is essentially an XML document. Its source file vuln.xml is kept right inside the port security/vuxml. Therefore the file's full pathname will be PORTSDIR/security/vuxml/vuln.xml. Each time you discover a security vulnerability in a port, please add an entry for it to that file. Until you are familiar with VuXML, the best thing you can do is to find an existing entry fitting your case, then copy it and use as a template. A short introduction to VuXML The full-blown XML is complex and far beyond the scope of this book. However, to gain basic insight on the structure of a VuXML entry, you need only the notion of tags. XML tag names are enclosed in angle brackets. Each opening <tag> must have a matching closing </tag>. Tags may be nested. If nesting, the inner tags must be closed before the outer ones. There is a hierarchy of tags, i.e. more complex rules of nesting them. Sounds very similar to HTML, doesn't it? The major difference is that XML is eXtensible, i.e. based on defining custom tags. Due to its intrinsic structure, XML puts otherwise amorphous data into shape. VuXML is particularly tailored to mark up descriptions of security vulnerabilities. Now let's consider a realistic VuXML entry: <vuln vid="f4bc80f4-da62-11d8-90ea-0004ac98a7b9"> <topic>Several vulnerabilities found in Foo</topic> <affects> <package> <name>foo</name> <name>foo-devel</name> <name>ja-foo</name> <range><ge>1.6</ge><lt>1.9</lt></range> <range><ge>2.*</ge><lt>2.4_1</lt></range> <range><eq>3.0b1</eq></range> </package> <package> <name>openfoo</name> <range><lt>1.10_7</lt></range> <range><ge>1.2,1</ge><lt>1.3_1,1</lt></range> </package> </affects> <description> <body xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <p>J. Random Hacker reports:</p> <blockquote cite="http://j.r.hacker.com/advisories/1"> <p>Several issues in the Foo software may be exploited via carefully crafted QUUX requests. These requests will permit the injection of Bar code, mumble theft, and the readability of the Foo administrator account.</p> </blockquote> </body> </description> <references> <freebsdsa>SA-10:75.foo</freebsdsa> <freebsdpr>ports/987654</freebsdpr> <cvename>CAN-2010-0201</cvename> <cvename>CAN-2010-0466</cvename> <bid>96298</bid> <certsa>CA-2010-99</certsa> <certvu>740169</certvu> <uscertsa>SA10-99A</uscertsa> <uscertta>SA10-99A</uscertta> <mlist msgid="201075606@hacker.com">http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=bugtraq&amp;m=203886607825605</mlist> <url>http://j.r.hacker.com/advisories/1</url> </references> <dates> <discovery>2010-05-25</discovery> <entry>2010-07-13</entry> <modified>2010-09-17</modified> </dates> </vuln> The tag names are supposed to be self-descriptive, so we shall take a closer look only at fields you will need to fill in by yourself: This is the top-level tag of a VuXML entry. It has a mandatory attribute, vid, specifying a universally unique identifier (UUID) for this entry (in quotes). You should generate a UUID for each new VuXML entry (and do not forget to substitute it for the template UUID unless you are writing the entry from scratch). You can use &man.uuidgen.1; to generate a VuXML UUID; alternatively, if you are using FreeBSD 4.x, you may install the port devel/p5-Data-UUID and issue the following command: perl -MData::UUID -le 'print lc new Data::UUID->create_str' This is a one-line description of the issue found. The names of packages affected are listed there. Multiple names can be given since several packages may be based on a single master port or software product. This may include stable and development branches, localized versions, and slave ports featuring different choices of important build-time configuration options. It is your responsibility to find all such related packages when writing a VuXML entry. Keep in mind that make search name=foo is your friend. The primary points to look for are as follows: the foo-devel variant for a foo port; other variants with a suffix like -a4 (for print-related packages), -without-gui (for packages with X support disabled), or similar; jp-, ru-, zh-, and other possible localized variants in the corresponding national categories of the ports collection. Affected versions of the package(s) are specified there as one or more ranges using a combination of <lt>, <le>, <eq>, <ge>, and <gt> elements. The version ranges given should not overlap. In a range specification, * (asterisk) denotes the smallest version number. In particular, 2.* is less than 2.a. Therefore an asterisk may be used for a range to match all possible alpha, beta, and RC versions. For instance, <ge>2.*</ge><lt>3.*</lt> will selectively match every 2.x version while <ge>2.0</ge><lt>3.0</lt> will obviously not since the latter misses 2.r3 and matches 3.b. The above example specifies that affected are versions from 1.6 to 1.9 inclusive, versions 2.x before 2.4_1, and version 3.0b1. Several related package groups (essentially, ports) can be listed in the <affected> section. This can be used if several software products (say FooBar, FreeBar and OpenBar) grow from the same code base and still share its bugs and vulnerabilities. Note the difference from listing multiple names within a single <package> section. The version ranges should allow for PORTEPOCH and PORTREVISION if applicable. Please remember that according to the collation rules, a version with a non-zero PORTEPOCH is greater than any version without PORTEPOCH, e.g., 3.0,1 is greater than 3.1 or even than 8.9. This is a summary of the issue. XHTML is used in this field. At least enclosing <p> and </p> should appear. More complex mark-up may be used, but only for the sake of accuracy and clarity: No eye candy please. This section contains references to relevant documents. As many references as apply are encouraged. This is a FreeBSD security advisory. This is a FreeBSD problem report. This is a Mitre CVE identifier. This is a SecurityFocus Bug ID. This is a US-CERT security advisory. This is a US-CERT vulnerability note. This is a US-CERT Cyber Security Alert. This is a US-CERT Technical Cyber Security Alert. This is a URL to an archived posting in a mailing list. The attribute msgid is optional and may specify the message ID of the posting. This is a generic URL. It should be used only if none of the other reference categories apply. This is the date when the issue was disclosed (YYYY-MM-DD). This is the date when the entry was added (YYYY-MM-DD). This is the date when any information in the entry was last modified (YYYY-MM-DD). New entries must not include this field. It should be added upon editing an existing entry. Testing your changes to the VuXML database Assume you just wrote or filled in an entry for a vulnerability in the package clamav that has been fixed in version 0.65_7. As a prerequisite, you need to install fresh versions of the ports ports-mgmt/portaudit and ports-mgmt/portaudit-db. First, check whether there already is an entry for this vulnerability. If there were such entry, it would match the previous version of the package, 0.65_6: &prompt.user; packaudit &prompt.user; portaudit clamav-0.65_6 To run packaudit, you must have permission to write to its DATABASEDIR, typically /var/db/portaudit. If there is none found, you get the green light to add a new entry for this vulnerability. Now you can generate a brand-new UUID (assume it's 74a9541d-5d6c-11d8-80e3-0020ed76ef5a) and add your new entry to the VuXML database. Please verify its syntax after that as follows: &prompt.user; cd ${PORTSDIR}/security/vuxml && make validate You will need at least one of the following packages installed: textproc/libxml2, textproc/jade. Now rebuild the portaudit database from the VuXML file: &prompt.user; packaudit To verify that the <affected> section of your entry will match correct package(s), issue the following command: &prompt.user; portaudit -f /usr/ports/INDEX -r 74a9541d-5d6c-11d8-80e3-0020ed76ef5a Please refer to &man.portaudit.1; for better understanding of the command syntax. Make sure that your entry produces no spurious matches in the output. Now check whether the right package versions are matched by your entry: &prompt.user; portaudit clamav-0.65_6 clamav-0.65_7 Affected package: clamav-0.65_6 (matched by clamav<0.65_7) Type of problem: clamav remote denial-of-service. Reference: <http://www.freebsd.org/ports/portaudit/74a9541d-5d6c-11d8-80e3-0020ed76ef5a.html> 1 problem(s) found. Obviously, the former version should match while the latter one should not. Finally, verify whether the web page generated from the VuXML database looks like expected: &prompt.user; mkdir -p ~/public_html/portaudit &prompt.user; packaudit &prompt.user; lynx ~/public_html/portaudit/74a9541d-5d6c-11d8-80e3-0020ed76ef5a.html Dos and Don'ts Introduction Here is a list of common dos and don'ts that you encounter during the porting process. You should check your own port against this list, but you can also check ports in the PR database that others have submitted. Submit any comments on ports you check as described in Bug Reports and General Commentary. Checking ports in the PR database will both make it faster for us to commit them, and prove that you know what you are doing. <makevar>WRKDIR</makevar> Do not write anything to files outside WRKDIR. WRKDIR is the only place that is guaranteed to be writable during the port build (see installing ports from a CDROM for an example of building ports from a read-only tree). If you need to modify one of the pkg-* files, do so by redefining a variable, not by writing over it. <makevar>WRKDIRPREFIX</makevar> Make sure your port honors WRKDIRPREFIX. Most ports do not have to worry about this. In particular, if you are referring to a WRKDIR of another port, note that the correct location is WRKDIRPREFIXPORTSDIR/subdir/name/work not PORTSDIR/subdir/name/work or .CURDIR/../../subdir/name/work or some such. Also, if you are defining WRKDIR yourself, make sure you prepend ${WRKDIRPREFIX}${.CURDIR} in the front. Differentiating operating systems and OS versions You may come across code that needs modifications or conditional compilation based upon what version of Unix it is running under. If you need to make such changes to the code for conditional compilation, make sure you make the changes as general as possible so that we can back-port code to older FreeBSD systems and cross-port to other BSD systems such as 4.4BSD from CSRG, BSD/386, 386BSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. The preferred way to tell 4.3BSD/Reno (1990) and newer versions of the BSD code apart is by using the BSD macro defined in sys/param.h. Hopefully that file is already included; if not, add the code: #if (defined(__unix__) || defined(unix)) && !defined(USG) #include <sys/param.h> #endif to the proper place in the .c file. We believe that every system that defines these two symbols has sys/param.h. If you find a system that does not, we would like to know. Please send mail to the &a.ports;. Another way is to use the GNU Autoconf style of doing this: #ifdef HAVE_SYS_PARAM_H #include <sys/param.h> #endif Do not forget to add -DHAVE_SYS_PARAM_H to the CFLAGS in the Makefile for this method. Once you have sys/param.h included, you may use: #if (defined(BSD) && (BSD >= 199103)) to detect if the code is being compiled on a 4.3 Net2 code base or newer (e.g. FreeBSD 1.x, 4.3/Reno, NetBSD 0.9, 386BSD, BSD/386 1.1 and below). Use: #if (defined(BSD) && (BSD >= 199306)) to detect if the code is being compiled on a 4.4 code base or newer (e.g. FreeBSD 2.x, 4.4, NetBSD 1.0, BSD/386 2.0 or above). The value of the BSD macro is 199506 for the 4.4BSD-Lite2 code base. This is stated for informational purposes only. It should not be used to distinguish between versions of FreeBSD based only on 4.4-Lite vs. versions that have merged in changes from 4.4-Lite2. The __FreeBSD__ macro should be used instead. Use sparingly: __FreeBSD__ is defined in all versions of FreeBSD. Use it if the change you are making only affects FreeBSD. Porting gotchas like the use of sys_errlist[] vs strerror() are Berkeley-isms, not FreeBSD changes. In FreeBSD 2.x, __FreeBSD__ is defined to be 2. In earlier versions, it is 1. Later versions always bump it to match their major version number. If you need to tell the difference between a FreeBSD 1.x system and a FreeBSD 2.x or above system, usually the right answer is to use the BSD macros described above. If there actually is a FreeBSD specific change (such as special shared library options when using ld) then it is OK to use __FreeBSD__ and #if __FreeBSD__ > 1 to detect a FreeBSD 2.x and later system. If you need more granularity in detecting FreeBSD systems since 2.0-RELEASE you can use the following: #if __FreeBSD__ >= 2 #include <osreldate.h> # if __FreeBSD_version >= 199504 /* 2.0.5+ release specific code here */ # endif #endif In the hundreds of ports that have been done, there have only been one or two cases where __FreeBSD__ should have been used. Just because an earlier port screwed up and used it in the wrong place does not mean you should do so too. __FreeBSD_version values Here is a convenient list of __FreeBSD_version values as defined in sys/param.h: __FreeBSD_version values Value Date Release 119411 2.0-RELEASE 199501, 199503 March 19, 1995 2.1-CURRENT 199504 April 9, 1995 2.0.5-RELEASE 199508 August 26, 1995 2.2-CURRENT before 2.1 199511 November 10, 1995 2.1.0-RELEASE 199512 November 10, 1995 2.2-CURRENT before 2.1.5 199607 July 10, 1996 2.1.5-RELEASE 199608 July 12, 1996 2.2-CURRENT before 2.1.6 199612 November 15, 1996 2.1.6-RELEASE 199612 2.1.7-RELEASE 220000 February 19, 1997 2.2-RELEASE (not changed) 2.2.1-RELEASE (not changed) 2.2-STABLE after 2.2.1-RELEASE 221001 April 15, 1997 2.2-STABLE after texinfo-3.9 221002 April 30, 1997 2.2-STABLE after top 222000 May 16, 1997 2.2.2-RELEASE 222001 May 19, 1997 2.2-STABLE after 2.2.2-RELEASE 225000 October 2, 1997 2.2.5-RELEASE 225001 November 20, 1997 2.2-STABLE after 2.2.5-RELEASE 225002 December 27, 1997 2.2-STABLE after ldconfig -R merge 226000 March 24, 1998 2.2.6-RELEASE 227000 July 21, 1998 2.2.7-RELEASE 227001 July 21, 1998 2.2-STABLE after 2.2.7-RELEASE 227002 September 19, 1998 2.2-STABLE after &man.semctl.2; change 228000 November 29, 1998 2.2.8-RELEASE 228001 November 29, 1998 2.2-STABLE after 2.2.8-RELEASE 300000 February 19, 1996 3.0-CURRENT before &man.mount.2; change 300001 September 24, 1997 3.0-CURRENT after &man.mount.2; change 300002 June 2, 1998 3.0-CURRENT after &man.semctl.2; change 300003 June 7, 1998 3.0-CURRENT after ioctl arg changes 300004 September 3, 1998 3.0-CURRENT after ELF conversion 300005 October 16, 1998 3.0-RELEASE 300006 October 16, 1998 3.0-CURRENT after 3.0-RELEASE 300007 January 22, 1999 3.0-STABLE after 3/4 branch 310000 February 9, 1999 3.1-RELEASE 310001 March 27, 1999 3.1-STABLE after 3.1-RELEASE 310002 April 14, 1999 3.1-STABLE after C++ constructor/destructor order change 320000 3.2-RELEASE 320001 May 8, 1999 3.2-STABLE 320002 August 29, 1999 3.2-STABLE after binary-incompatible IPFW and socket changes 330000 September 2, 1999 3.3-RELEASE 330001 September 16, 1999 3.3-STABLE 330002 November 24, 1999 3.3-STABLE after adding &man.mkstemp.3; to libc 340000 December 5, 1999 3.4-RELEASE 340001 December 17, 1999 3.4-STABLE 350000 June 20, 2000 3.5-RELEASE 350001 July 12, 2000 3.5-STABLE 400000 January 22, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after 3.4 branch 400001 February 20, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after change in dynamic linker handling 400002 March 13, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after C++ constructor/destructor order change 400003 March 27, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after functioning &man.dladdr.3; 400004 April 5, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after __deregister_frame_info dynamic linker bug fix (also 4.0-CURRENT after EGCS 1.1.2 integration) 400005 April 27, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after &man.suser.9; API change (also 4.0-CURRENT after newbus) 400006 May 31, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after cdevsw registration change 400007 June 17, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after the addition of so_cred for socket level credentials 400008 June 20, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after the addition of a poll syscall wrapper to libc_r 400009 July 20, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after the change of the kernel's dev_t type to struct specinfo pointer 400010 September 25, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after fixing a hole in &man.jail.2; 400011 September 29, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after the sigset_t datatype change 400012 November 15, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after the cutover to the GCC 2.95.2 compiler 400013 December 4, 1999 4.0-CURRENT after adding pluggable linux-mode ioctl handlers 400014 January 18, 2000 4.0-CURRENT after importing OpenSSL 400015 January 27, 2000 4.0-CURRENT after the C++ ABI change in GCC 2.95.2 from -fvtable-thunks to -fno-vtable-thunks by default 400016 February 27, 2000 4.0-CURRENT after importing OpenSSH 400017 March 13, 2000 4.0-RELEASE 400018 March 17, 2000 4.0-STABLE after 4.0-RELEASE 400019 May 5, 2000 4.0-STABLE after the introduction of delayed checksums. 400020 June 4, 2000 4.0-STABLE after merging libxpg4 code into libc. 400021 July 8, 2000 4.0-STABLE after upgrading Binutils to 2.10.0, ELF branding changes, and tcsh in the base system. 410000 July 14, 2000 4.1-RELEASE 410001 July 29, 2000 4.1-STABLE after 4.1-RELEASE 410002 September 16, 2000 4.1-STABLE after &man.setproctitle.3; moved from libutil to libc. 411000 September 25, 2000 4.1.1-RELEASE 411001 4.1.1-STABLE after 4.1.1-RELEASE 420000 October 31, 2000 4.2-RELEASE 420001 January 10, 2001 4.2-STABLE after combining libgcc.a and libgcc_r.a, and associated GCC linkage changes. 430000 March 6, 2001 4.3-RELEASE 430001 May 18, 2001 4.3-STABLE after wint_t introduction. 430002 July 22, 2001 4.3-STABLE after PCI powerstate API merge. 440000 August 1, 2001 4.4-RELEASE 440001 October 23, 2001 4.4-STABLE after d_thread_t introduction. 440002 November 4, 2001 4.4-STABLE after mount structure changes (affects filesystem klds). 440003 December 18, 2001 4.4-STABLE after the userland components of smbfs were imported. 450000 December 20, 2001 4.5-RELEASE 450001 February 24, 2002 4.5-STABLE after the usb structure element rename. 450004 April 16, 2002 4.5-STABLE after the sendmail_enable &man.rc.conf.5; variable was made to take the value NONE. 450005 April 27, 2002 4.5-STABLE after moving to XFree86 4 by default for package builds. 450006 May 1, 2002 4.5-STABLE after accept filtering was fixed so that is no longer susceptible to an easy DoS. 460000 June 21, 2002 4.6-RELEASE 460001 June 21, 2002 4.6-STABLE &man.sendfile.2; fixed to comply with documentation, not to count any headers sent against the amount of data to be sent from the file. 460002 July 19, 2002 4.6.2-RELEASE 460100 June 26, 2002 4.6-STABLE 460101 June 26, 2002 4.6-STABLE after MFC of `sed -i'. 460102 September 1, 2002 4.6-STABLE after MFC of many new pkg_install features from the HEAD. 470000 October 8, 2002 4.7-RELEASE 470100 October 9, 2002 4.7-STABLE 470101 November 10, 2002 Start generated __std{in,out,err}p references rather than __sF. This changes std{in,out,err} from a compile time expression to a runtime one. 470102 January 23, 2003 4.7-STABLE after MFC of mbuf changes to replace m_aux mbufs by m_tag's 470103 February 14, 2003 4.7-STABLE gets OpenSSL 0.9.7 480000 March 30, 2003 4.8-RELEASE 480100 April 5, 2003 4.8-STABLE 480101 May 22, 2003 4.8-STABLE after &man.realpath.3; has been made thread-safe 480102 August 10, 2003 4.8-STABLE 3ware API changes to twe. 490000 October 27, 2003 4.9-RELEASE 490100 October 27, 2003 4.9-STABLE 490101 January 8, 2004 4.9-STABLE after e_sid was added to struct kinfo_eproc. 490102 February 4, 2004 4.9-STABLE after MFC of libmap functionality for rtld. 491000 May 25, 2004 4.10-RELEASE 491100 June 1, 2004 4.10-STABLE 491101 August 11, 2004 4.10-STABLE after MFC of revision 20040629 of the package tools 491102 November 16, 2004 4.10-STABLE after VM fix dealing with unwiring of fictitious pages 492000 December 17, 2004 4.11-RELEASE 492100 December 17, 2004 4.11-STABLE 492101 April 18, 2006 4.11-STABLE after adding libdata/ldconfig directories to mtree files. 500000 March 13, 2000 5.0-CURRENT 500001 April 18, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after adding addition ELF header fields, and changing our ELF binary branding method. 500002 May 2, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after kld metadata changes. 500003 May 18, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after buf/bio changes. 500004 May 26, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after binutils upgrade. 500005 June 3, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after merging libxpg4 code into libc and after TASKQ interface introduction. 500006 June 10, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after the addition of AGP interfaces. 500007 June 29, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after Perl upgrade to 5.6.0 500008 July 7, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after the update of KAME code to 2000/07 sources. 500009 July 14, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after ether_ifattach() and ether_ifdetach() changes. 500010 July 16, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after changing mtree defaults back to original variant, adding -L to follow symlinks. 500011 July 18, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after kqueue API changed. 500012 September 2, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after &man.setproctitle.3; moved from libutil to libc. 500013 September 10, 2000 5.0-CURRENT after the first SMPng commit. 500014 January 4, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after <sys/select.h> moved to <sys/selinfo.h>. 500015 January 10, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after combining libgcc.a and libgcc_r.a, and associated GCC linkage changes. 500016 January 24, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after change allowing libc and libc_r to be linked together, deprecating -pthread option. 500017 February 18, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after switch from struct ucred to struct xucred to stabilize kernel-exported API for mountd et al. 500018 February 24, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after addition of CPUTYPE make variable for controlling CPU-specific optimizations. 500019 June 9, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after moving machine/ioctl_fd.h to sys/fdcio.h 500020 June 15, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after locale names renaming. 500021 June 22, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after Bzip2 import. Also signifies removal of S/Key. 500022 July 12, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after SSE support. 500023 September 14, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after KSE Milestone 2. 500024 October 1, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after d_thread_t, and moving UUCP to ports. 500025 October 4, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after ABI change for descriptor and creds passing on 64 bit platforms. 500026 October 9, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after moving to XFree86 4 by default for package builds, and after the new libc strnstr() function was added. 500027 October 10, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after the new libc strcasestr() function was added. 500028 December 14, 2001 5.0-CURRENT after the userland components of smbfs were imported. (not changed) 5.0-CURRENT after the new C99 specific-width integer types were added. 500029 January 29, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after a change was made in the return value of &man.sendfile.2;. 500030 February 15, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after the introduction of the type fflags_t, which is the appropriate size for file flags. 500031 February 24, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after the usb structure element rename. 500032 March 16, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after the introduction of Perl 5.6.1. 500033 April 3, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after the sendmail_enable &man.rc.conf.5; variable was made to take the value NONE. 500034 April 30, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after mtx_init() grew a third argument. 500035 May 13, 2002 5.0-CURRENT with Gcc 3.1. 500036 May 17, 2002 5.0-CURRENT without Perl in /usr/src 500037 May 29, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after the addition of &man.dlfunc.3; 500038 July 24, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after the types of some struct sockbuf members were changed and the structure was reordered. 500039 September 1, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after GCC 3.2.1 import. Also after headers stopped using _BSD_FOO_T_ and started using _FOO_T_DECLARED. This value can also be used as a conservative estimate of the start of &man.bzip2.1; package support. 500040 September 20, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after various changes to disk functions were made in the name of removing dependency on disklabel structure internals. 500041 October 1, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after the addition of &man.getopt.long.3; to libc. 500042 October 15, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after Binutils 2.13 upgrade, which included new FreeBSD emulation, vec, and output format. 500043 November 1, 2002 5.0-CURRENT after adding weak pthread_XXX stubs to libc, obsoleting libXThrStub.so. 5.0-RELEASE. 500100 January 17, 2003 5.0-CURRENT after branching for RELENG_5_0 500101 February 19, 2003 <sys/dkstat.h> is empty and should not be included. 500102 February 25, 2003 5.0-CURRENT after the d_mmap_t interface change. 500103 February 26, 2003 5.0-CURRENT after taskqueue_swi changed to run without Giant, and taskqueue_swi_giant added to run with Giant. 500104 February 27, 2003 cdevsw_add() and cdevsw_remove() no longer exists. Appearance of MAJOR_AUTO allocation facility. 500105 March 4, 2003 5.0-CURRENT after new cdevsw initialization method. 500106 March 8, 2003 devstat_add_entry() has been replaced by devstat_new_entry() 500107 March 15, 2003 Devstat interface change; see sys/sys/param.h 1.149 500108 March 15, 2003 Token-Ring interface changes. 500109 March 25, 2003 Addition of vm_paddr_t. 500110 March 28, 2003 5.0-CURRENT after &man.realpath.3; has been made thread-safe 500111 April 9, 2003 5.0-CURRENT after &man.usbhid.3; has been synced with NetBSD 500112 April 17, 2003 5.0-CURRENT after new NSS implementation and addition of POSIX.1 getpw*_r, getgr*_r functions 500113 May 2, 2003 5.0-CURRENT after removal of the old rc system. 501000 June 4, 2003 5.1-RELEASE. 501100 June 2, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after branching for RELENG_5_1. 501101 June 29, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after correcting the semantics of sigtimedwait(2) and sigwaitinfo(2). 501102 July 3, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after adding the lockfunc and lockfuncarg fields to &man.bus.dma.tag.create.9;. 501103 July 31, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after GCC 3.3.1-pre 20030711 snapshot integration. 501104 August 5, 2003 5.1-CURRENT 3ware API changes to twe. 501105 August 17, 2003 5.1-CURRENT dynamically-linked /bin and /sbin support and movement of libraries to /lib. 501106 September 8, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after adding kernel support for Coda 6.x. 501107 September 17, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after 16550 UART constants moved from <dev/sio/sioreg.h> to <dev/ic/ns16550.h>. Also when libmap functionality was unconditionally supported by rtld. 501108 September 23, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after PFIL_HOOKS API update 501109 September 27, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after adding kiconv(3) 501110 September 28, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after changing default operations for open and close in cdevsw 501111 October 16, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after changed layout of cdevsw 501112 October 16, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after adding kobj multiple inheritance 501113 October 31, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after the if_xname change in struct ifnet 501114 November 16, 2003 5.1-CURRENT after changing /bin and /sbin to be dynamically linked 502000 December 7, 2003 5.2-RELEASE 502010 February 23, 2004 5.2.1-RELEASE 502100 December 7, 2003 5.2-CURRENT after branching for RELENG_5_2 502101 December 19, 2003 5.2-CURRENT after __cxa_atexit/__cxa_finalize functions were added to libc. 502102 January 30, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after change of default thread library from libc_r to libpthread. 502103 February 21, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after device driver API megapatch. 502104 February 25, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after getopt_long_only() addition. 502105 March 5, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after NULL is made into ((void *)0) for C, creating more warnings. 502106 March 8, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after pf is linked to the build and install. 502107 March 10, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after time_t is changed to a 64-bit value on sparc64. 502108 March 12, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after Intel C/C++ compiler support in some headers and execve(2) changes to be more strictly conforming to POSIX. 502109 March 22, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after the introduction of the bus_alloc_resource_any API 502110 March 27, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after the addition of UTF-8 locales 502111 April 11, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after the removal of the getvfsent(3) API 502112 April 13, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after the addition of the .warning directive for make. 502113 June 4, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after ttyioctl() was made mandatory for serial drivers. 502114 June 13, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after import of the ALTQ framework. 502115 June 14, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after changing sema_timedwait(9) to return 0 on success and a non-zero error code on failure. 502116 June 16, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after changing kernel dev_t to be pointer to struct cdev *. 502117 June 17, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after changing kernel udev_t to dev_t. 502118 June 17, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after adding support for CLOCK_VIRTUAL and CLOCK_PROF to clock_gettime(2) and clock_getres(2). 502119 June 22, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after changing network interface cloning overhaul. 502120 July 2, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after the update of the package tools to revision 20040629. 502121 July 9, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after marking Bluetooth code as non-i386 specific. 502122 July 11, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after the introduction of the KDB debugger framework, the conversion of DDB into a backend and the introduction of the GDB backend. 502123 July 12, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after change to make VFS_ROOT take a struct thread argument as does vflush. Struct kinfo_proc now has a user data pointer. The switch of the default X implementation to xorg was also made at this time. 502124 July 24, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after the change to separate the way ports rc.d and legacy scripts are started. 502125 July 28, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after the backout of the previous change. 502126 July 31, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after the removal of kmem_alloc_pageable() and the import of gcc 3.4.2. 502127 August 2, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after changing the UMA kernel API to allow ctors/inits to fail. 502128 August 8, 2004 5.2-CURRENT after the change of the vfs_mount signature as well as global replacement of PRISON_ROOT with SUSER_ALLOWJAIL for the suser(9) API. 503000 August 23, 2004 5.3-BETA/RC before the pfil API change 503001 September 22, 2004 5.3-RELEASE 503100 October 16, 2004 5.3-STABLE after branching for RELENG_5_3 503101 December 3, 2004 5.3-STABLE after addition of glibc style &man.strftime.3; padding options. 503102 February 13, 2005 5.3-STABLE after OpenBSD's nc(1) import MFC. 503103 February 27, 2005 5.4-PRERELEASE after the MFC of the fixes in <src/include/stdbool.h> and <src/sys/i386/include/_types.h> for using the GCC-compatibility of the Intel C/C++ compiler. 503104 February 28, 2005 5.4-PRERELEASE after the MFC of the change of ifi_epoch from wall clock time to uptime. 503105 March 2, 2005 5.4-PRERELEASE after the MFC of the fix of EOVERFLOW check in vswprintf(3). 504000 April 3, 2005 5.4-RELEASE. 504100 April 3, 2005 5.4-STABLE after branching for RELENG_5_4 504101 May 11, 2005 5.4-STABLE after increasing the default thread stacksizes 504102 June 24, 2005 5.4-STABLE after the addition of sha256 504103 October 3, 2005 5.4-STABLE after the MFC of if_bridge 504104 November 13, 2005 5.4-STABLE after the MFC of bsdiff and portsnap 504105 January 17, 2006 5.4-STABLE after MFC of ldconfig_local_dirs change. 505000 May 12, 2006 5.5-RELEASE. 505100 May 12, 2006 5.5-STABLE after branching for RELENG_5_5 600000 August 18, 2004 6.0-CURRENT 600001 August 27, 2004 6.0-CURRENT after permanently enabling PFIL_HOOKS in the kernel. 600002 August 30, 2004 6.0-CURRENT after initial addition of ifi_epoch to struct if_data. Backed out after a few days. Do not use this value. 600003 September 8, 2004 6.0-CURRENT after the re-addition of the ifi_epoch member of struct if_data. 600004 September 29, 2004 6.0-CURRENT after addition of the struct inpcb argument to the pfil API. 600005 October 5, 2004 6.0-CURRENT after addition of the "-d DESTDIR" argument to newsyslog. 600006 November 4, 2004 6.0-CURRENT after addition of glibc style &man.strftime.3; padding options. 600007 December 12, 2004 6.0-CURRENT after addition of 802.11 framework updates. 600008 January 25, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after changes to VOP_*VOBJECT() functions and introduction of MNTK_MPSAFE flag for Giantfree filesystems. 600009 February 4, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after addition of the cpufreq framework and drivers. 600010 February 6, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after importing OpenBSD's nc(1). 600011 February 12, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after removing semblance of SVID2 matherr() support. 600012 February 15, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after increase of default thread stacks' size. 600013 February 19, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after fixes in <src/include/stdbool.h> and <src/sys/i386/include/_types.h> for using the GCC-compatibility of the Intel C/C++ compiler. 600014 February 21, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after EOVERFLOW checks in vswprintf(3) fixed. 600015 February 25, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after changing the struct if_data member, ifi_epoch, from wall clock time to uptime. 600016 February 26, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after LC_CTYPE disk format changed. 600017 February 27, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after NLS catalogs disk format changed. 600018 February 27, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after LC_COLLATE disk format changed. 600019 February 28, 2005 Installation of acpica includes into /usr/include. 600020 March 9, 2005 Addition of MSG_NOSIGNAL flag to send(2) API. 600021 March 17, 2005 Addition of fields to cdevsw 600022 March 21, 2005 Removed gtar from base system. 600023 April 13, 2005 LOCAL_CREDS, LOCAL_CONNWAIT socket options added to unix(4). 600024 April 19, 2005 &man.hwpmc.4; and related tools added to 6.0-CURRENT. 600025 April 26, 2005 struct icmphdr added to 6.0-CURRENT. 600026 May 3, 2005 pf updated to 3.7. 600027 May 6, 2005 Kernel libalias and ng_nat introduced. 600028 May 13, 2005 POSIX ttyname_r(3) made available through unistd.h and libc. 600029 May 29, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after libpcap updated to v0.9.1 alpha 096. 600030 June 5, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after importing NetBSD's if_bridge(4). 600031 June 10, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after struct ifnet was broken out of the driver softcs. 600032 July 11, 2005 6.0-CURRENT after the import of libpcap v0.9.1. 600033 July 25, 2005 6.0-STABLE after bump of all shared library versions that had not been changed since RELENG_5. 600034 August 13, 2005 6.0-STABLE after credential argument is added to dev_clone event handler. 6.0-RELEASE. 600100 November 1, 2005 6.0-STABLE after 6.0-RELEASE 600101 December 21, 2005 6.0-STABLE after incorporating scripts from the local_startup directories into the base &man.rcorder.8;. 600102 December 30, 2005 6.0-STABLE after updating the ELF types and constants. 600103 January 15, 2006 6.0-STABLE after MFC of pidfile(3) API. 600104 January 17, 2006 6.0-STABLE after MFC of ldconfig_local_dirs change. 600105 February 26, 2006 6.0-STABLE after NLS catalog support of csh(1). 601000 May 6, 2006 6.1-RELEASE 601100 May 6, 2006 6.1-STABLE after 6.1-RELEASE. 601101 June 22, 2006 6.1-STABLE after the import of csup. 601102 July 11, 2006 6.1-STABLE after the iwi(4) update. 601103 July 17, 2006 6.1-STABLE after the resolver update to BIND9, and exposure of reentrant version of netdb functions. 601104 August 8, 2006 6.1-STABLE after DSO (dynamic shared objects) support has been enabled in OpenSSL. 601105 September 2, 2006 6.1-STABLE after 802.11 fixups changed the api for the IEEE80211_IOC_STA_INFO ioctl. 602000 November 15, 2006 6.2-RELEASE 602100 September 15, 2006 6.2-STABLE after 6.2-RELEASE. 602101 December 12, 2006 6.2-STABLE after the addition of Wi-Spy quirk. 602102 December 28, 2006 6.2-STABLE after pci_find_extcap() addition. 602103 January 16, 2007 6.2-STABLE after MFC of dlsym change to look for a requested symbol both in specified dso and its implicit dependencies. 602104 January 28, 2007 6.2-STABLE after MFC of ng_deflate(4) and ng_pred1(4) netgraph nodes and new compression and encryption modes for ng_ppp(4) node. 602105 February 20, 2007 6.2-STABLE after MFC of BSD licensed version of &man.gzip.1; ported from NetBSD. 602106 March 31, 2007 6.2-STABLE after MFC of PCI MSI and MSI-X support. 602107 April 6, 2007 6.2-STABLE after MFC of ncurses 5.6 and wide character support. 602108 April 11, 2007 6.2-STABLE after MFC of CAM 'SG' peripheral device, which implements a subset of Linux SCSI SG passthrough device API. 602109 April 17, 2007 6.2-STABLE after MFC of readline 5.2 patchset 002. 602110 May 2, 2007 6.2-STABLE after MFC of pmap_invalidate_cache(), pmap_change_attr(), pmap_mapbios(), pmap_mapdev_attr(), and pmap_unmapbios() for amd64 and i386. 602111 June 11, 2007 6.2-STABLE after MFC of BOP_BDFLUSH and caused breakage of the filesystem modules KBI. 602112 September 21, 2007 6.2-STABLE after libutil(3) MFC's. 602113 October 25, 2007 6.2-STABLE after MFC of wide and single byte ctype separation. Newly compiled binary that references to ctype.h may require a new symbol, __mb_sb_limit, which is not available on older systems. 602114 October 30, 2007 6.2-STABLE after ctype ABI forward compatibility restored. 602115 November 21, 2007 6.2-STABLE after back out of wide and single byte ctype separation. 603000 November 25, 2007 6.3-RELEASE 603100 November 25, 2007 6.3-STABLE after 6.3-RELEASE. 603101 December 7, 2007 6.3-STABLE after fixing multibyte type support in bit macro. 603102 April 24, 2008 6.3-STABLE after adding l_sysid to struct flock. 603103 May 27, 2008 6.3-STABLE after MFC of the memrchr function. 603104 June 15, 2008 6.3-STABLE after MFC of support for :u variable modifier in make(1). 604000 October 4, 2008 6.4-RELEASE 604100 October 4, 2008 6.4-STABLE after 6.4-RELEASE. 700000 July 11, 2005 7.0-CURRENT. 700001 July 23, 2005 7.0-CURRENT after bump of all shared library versions that had not been changed since RELENG_5. 700002 August 13, 2005 7.0-CURRENT after credential argument is added to dev_clone event handler. 700003 August 25, 2005 7.0-CURRENT after memmem(3) is added to libc. 700004 October 30, 2005 7.0-CURRENT after solisten(9) kernel arguments are modified to accept a backlog parameter. 700005 November 11, 2005 7.0-CURRENT after IFP2ENADDR() was changed to return a pointer to IF_LLADDR(). 700006 November 11, 2005 7.0-CURRENT after addition of if_addr member to struct ifnet and IFP2ENADDR() removal. 700007 December 2, 2005 7.0-CURRENT after incorporating scripts from the local_startup directories into the base &man.rcorder.8;. 700008 December 5, 2005 7.0-CURRENT after removal of MNT_NODEV mount option. 700009 December 19, 2005 7.0-CURRENT after ELF-64 type changes and symbol versioning. 700010 December 20, 2005 7.0-CURRENT after addition of hostb and vgapci drivers, addition of pci_find_extcap(), and changing the AGP drivers to no longer map the aperture. 700011 December 31, 2005 7.0-CURRENT after tv_sec was made time_t on all platforms but Alpha. 700012 January 8, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after ldconfig_local_dirs change. 700013 January 12, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after changes to /etc/rc.d/abi to support /compat/linux/etc/ld.so.cache being a symlink in a readonly filesystem. 700014 January 26, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after pts import. 700015 March 26, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after the introduction of version 2 of &man.hwpmc.4;'s ABI. 700016 April 22, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after addition of &man.fcloseall.3; to libc. 700017 May 13, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after removal of ip6fw. 700018 July 15, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after import of snd_emu10kx. 700019 July 29, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after import of OpenSSL 0.9.8b. 700020 September 3, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after addition of bus_dma_get_tag function 700021 September 4, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after libpcap 0.9.4 and tcpdump 3.9.4 import. 700022 September 9, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after dlsym change to look for a requested symbol both in specified dso and its implicit dependencies. 700023 September 23, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after adding new sound IOCTLs for the OSSv4 mixer API. 700024 September 28, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after import of OpenSSL 0.9.8d. 700025 November 11, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after the addition of libelf. 700026 November 26, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after major changes on sound sysctls. 700027 November 30, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after the addition of Wi-Spy quirk. 700028 December 15, 2006 7.0-CURRENT after the addition of sctp calls to libc 700029 January 26, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after the GNU &man.gzip.1; implementation was replaced with a BSD licensed version ported from NetBSD. 700030 February 7, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after the removal of IPIP tunnel encapsulation (VIFF_TUNNEL) from the IPv4 multicast forwarding code. 700031 February 23, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after the modification of bus_setup_intr() (newbus). 700032 March 2, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after the inclusion of ipw(4) and iwi(4) firmwares. 700033 March 9, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after the inclusion of ncurses wide character support. 700034 March 19, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after changes to how insmntque(), getnewvnode(), and vfs_hash_insert() work. 700035 March 26, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after addition of a notify mechanism for CPU frequency changes. 700036 April 6, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after import of the ZFS filesystem. 700037 April 8, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after addition of CAM 'SG' peripheral device, which implements a subset of Linux SCSI SG passthrough device API. 700038 April 30, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after changing &man.getenv.3;, &man.putenv.3;, &man.setenv.3; and &man.unsetenv.3; to be POSIX conformant. 700039 May 1, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after the changes in 700038 were backed out. 700040 May 10, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after the addition of &man.flopen.3; to libutil. 700041 May 13, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after enabling symbol versioning, and changing the default thread library to libthr. 700042 May 19, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after the import of gcc 4.2.0. 700043 May 21, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after bump of all shared library versions that had not been changed since RELENG_6. 700044 June 7, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after changing the argument for - vn_open()/VOP_OPEN() from filedescriptor index to the + vn_open()/VOP_OPEN() from file descriptor index to the struct file *. 700045 June 10, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after changing &man.pam.nologin.8; to provide an account management function instead of an authentication function to the PAM framework. 700046 June 11, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after updated 802.11 wireless support. 700047 June 11, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after adding TCP LRO interface capabilities. 700048 June 12, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after RFC 3678 API support added to the IPv4 stack. Legacy RFC 1724 behavior of the IP_MULTICAST_IF ioctl has now been removed; 0.0.0.0/8 may no longer be used to specify an interface index. struct ipmreqn should be used instead. 700049 July 3, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after importing pf from OpenBSD 4.1 (not changed) 7.0-CURRENT after adding IPv6 support for FAST_IPSEC, deleting KAME IPSEC, and renaming FAST_IPSEC to IPSEC. 700050 July 4, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after converting setenv/putenv/etc. calls from traditional BSD to POSIX. 700051 July 4, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after adding new mmap/lseek/etc syscalls. 700052 July 6, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after moving I4B headers to include/i4b. 700053 September 30, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after the addition of support for PCI domains 700054 October 25, 2007 7.0-CURRENT after MFC of wide and single byte ctype separation. 700055 October 28, 2007 7.0-RELEASE, and 7.0-CURRENT after ABI backwards compatibility to the FreeBSD 4/5/6 versions of the PCIOCGETCONF, PCIOCREAD and PCIOCWRITE IOCTLs was MFC'ed, which required the ABI of the PCIOCGETCONF IOCTL to be broken again 700100 December 22, 2007 7.0-STABLE after 7.0-RELEASE 700101 February 8, 2008 7.0-STABLE after the MFC of m_collapse(). 700102 March 30, 2008 7.0-STABLE after the MFC of kdb_enter_why(). 700103 April 10, 2008 7.0-STABLE after adding l_sysid to struct flock. 700104 April 11, 2008 7.0-STABLE after the MFC of procstat(1). 700105 April 11, 2008 7.0-STABLE after the MFC of umtx features. 700106 April 15, 2008 7.0-STABLE after the MFC of &man.write.2; support to &man.psm.4;. 700107 April 20, 2008 7.0-STABLE after the MFC of F_DUP2FD command to &man.fcntl.2;. 700108 May 5, 2008 7.0-STABLE after some &man.lockmgr.9; changes, which makes it necessary to include sys/lock.h in order to use &man.lockmgr.9;. 700109 May 27, 2008 7.0-STABLE after MFC of the memrchr function. 700110 August 5, 2008 7.0-STABLE after MFC of kernel NFS lockd client. 700111 August 20, 2008 7.0-STABLE after addition of physically contiguous jumbo frame support. 700112 August 27, 2008 7.0-STABLE after MFC of kernel DTrace support. 701000 November 25, 2008 7.1-RELEASE 701100 November 25, 2008 7.1-STABLE after 7.1-RELEASE. 701101 January 10, 2009 7.1-STABLE after strndup merge. 701102 January 17, 2009 7.1-STABLE after cpuctl(4) support added. 701103 February 7, 2009 7.1-STABLE after the merge of multi-/no-IPv4/v6 jails. 701104 February 14, 2009 7.1-STABLE after the store of the suspension owner in the struct mount, and introduction of vfs_susp_clean method into the struct vfsops. 701105 March 12, 2009 7.1-STABLE after the incompatible change to the kern.ipc.shmsegs sysctl to allow to allocate larger SysV shared memory segments on 64bit architectures. 701106 March 14, 2009 7.1-STABLE after the merge of a fix for POSIX semaphore wait operations. 702000 April 15, 2009 7.2-RELEASE 702100 April 15, 2009 7.2-STABLE after 7.2-RELEASE. 702101 May 15, 2009 7.2-STABLE after ichsmb(4) was changed to use left-adjusted slave addressing to match other SMBus controller drivers. 702102 May 28, 2009 7.2-STABLE after MFC of the fdopendir function. 702103 June 06, 2009 7.2-STABLE after MFC of PmcTools. 702104 July 14, 2009 7.2-STABLE after MFC of the closefrom system call. 702105 July 31, 2009 7.2-STABLE after MFC of the SYSVIPC ABI change. 702106 September 14, 2009 7.2-STABLE after MFC of the x86 PAT enhancements and addition of d_mmap_single() and the scatter/gather list VM object type. 703000 February 9, 2010 7.3-RELEASE 703100 February 9, 2010 7.3-STABLE after 7.3-RELEASE. 800000 October 11, 2007 8.0-CURRENT. Separating wide and single byte ctype. 800001 October 16, 2007 8.0-CURRENT after libpcap 0.9.8 and tcpdump 3.9.8 import. 800002 October 21, 2007 8.0-CURRENT after renaming kthread_create() and friends to kproc_create() etc. 800003 October 24, 2007 8.0-CURRENT after ABI backwards compatibility to the FreeBSD 4/5/6 versions of the PCIOCGETCONF, PCIOCREAD and PCIOCWRITE IOCTLs was added, which required the ABI of the PCIOCGETCONF IOCTL to be broken again 800004 November 12, 2007 8.0-CURRENT after agp(4) driver moved from src/sys/pci to src/sys/dev/agp 800005 December 4, 2007 8.0-CURRENT after changes to the jumbo frame allocator. 800006 December 7, 2007 8.0-CURRENT after the addition of callgraph capture functionality to &man.hwpmc.4;. 800007 December 25, 2007 8.0-CURRENT after kdb_enter() gains a "why" argument. 800008 December 28, 2007 8.0-CURRENT after LK_EXCLUPGRADE option removal. 800009 January 9, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after introduction of &man.lockmgr.disown.9; 800010 January 10, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the &man.vn.lock.9; prototype change. 800011 January 13, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the &man.VOP.LOCK.9; and &man.VOP.UNLOCK.9; prototype changes. 800012 January 19, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after introduction of &man.lockmgr.recursed.9;, &man.BUF.RECURSED.9; and &man.BUF.ISLOCKED.9; and the removal of BUF_REFCNT(). 800013 January 23, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after introduction of the ASCII encoding. 800014 January 24, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after changing the prototype of &man.lockmgr.9; and removal of lockcount() and LOCKMGR_ASSERT(). 800015 January 26, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after extending the types of the &man.fts.3; structures. 800016 February 1, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after adding an argument to MEXTADD(9) 800017 February 6, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the introduction of LK_NODUP and LK_NOWITNESS options in the &man.lockmgr.9; space. 800018 February 8, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the addition of m_collapse. 800019 February 9, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the addition of current working directory, root directory, and jail directory support to the kern.proc.filedesc sysctl. 800020 February 13, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after introduction of &man.lockmgr.assert.9; and BUF_ASSERT functions. 800021 February 15, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after introduction of &man.lockmgr.args.9; and LK_INTERNAL flag removal. 800022 (backed out) 8.0-CURRENT after changing the default system ar to BSD &man.ar.1;. 800023 February 25, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after changing the prototypes of &man.lockstatus.9; and &man.VOP.ISLOCKED.9;, more specifically retiring the struct thread argument. 800024 March 1, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after axing out the lockwaiters and BUF_LOCKWAITERS functions, changing the return value of brelvp from void to int and introducing new flags for &man.lockinit.9;. 800025 March 8, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after adding F_DUP2FD command to &man.fcntl.2;. 800026 March 12, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after changing the priority parameter to cv_broadcastpri such that 0 means no priority. 800027 March 24, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after changing the bpf monitoring ABI when zerocopy bpf buffers were added. 800028 March 26, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after adding l_sysid to struct flock. 800029 March 28, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after reintegration of the BUF_LOCKWAITERS function and the addition of &man.lockmgr.waiters.9;. 800030 April 1, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the introduction of the &man.rw.try.rlock.9; and &man.rw.try.wlock.9; functions. 800031 April 6, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the introduction of the lockmgr_rw and lockmgr_args_rw functions. 800032 April 8, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the implementation of the openat and related syscalls, introduction of the O_EXEC flag for the &man.open.2;, and providing the corresponding linux compatibility syscalls. 800033 April 8, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after added &man.write.2; support for &man.psm.4; in native operation level. Now arbitrary commands can be written to /dev/psm%d and status can be read back from it. 800034 April 10, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after introduction of the memrchr function. 800035 April 16, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after introduction of the fdopendir function. 800036 April 20, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after switchover of 802.11 wireless to multi-bss support (aka vaps). 800037 May 9, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after addition of multi routing table support (a.k.a. setfib(1), setfib(2)). 800038 May 26, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after removal of netatm and ISDN4BSD. 800039 June 14, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after removal of sgtty. 800040 June 26, 2008 8.0-CURRENT with kernel NFS lockd client. 800041 July 22, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after addition of arc4random_buf(3) and arc4random_uniform(3). 800042 August 8, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after addition of cpuctl(4). 800043 August 13, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after changing bpf(4) to use a single device node, instead of device cloning. 800044 August 17, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the commit of the first step of the vimage project renaming global variables to be virtualized with a V_ prefix with macros to map them back to their global names. 800045 August 20, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the integration of the MPSAFE TTY layer, including changes to various drivers and utilities that interact with it. 800046 September 8, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the separation of the GDT per CPU on amd64 architecture. 800047 September 10, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after removal of VSVTX, VSGID and VSUID. 800048 September 16, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after converting the kernel NFS mount code to accept individual mount options in the nmount() iovec, not just one big struct nfs_args. 800049 September 17, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the removal of &man.suser.9; and &man.suser.cred.9;. 800050 October 20, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after buffer cache API change. 800051 October 23, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the removal of the &man.MALLOC.9; and &man.FREE.9; macros. 800052 October 28, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the introduction of accmode_t and renaming of VOP_ACCESS 'a_mode' argument to 'a_accmode'. 800053 November 2, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the prototype change of &man.vfs.busy.9; and the introduction of its MBF_NOWAIT and MBF_MNTLSTLOCK flags. 800054 November 22, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the addition of buf_ring, memory barriers and ifnet functions to facilitate multiple hardware transmit queues for cards that support them, and a lockless ring-buffer implementation to enable drivers to more efficiently manage queuing of packets. 800055 November 27, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the addition of Intel™ Core, Core2, and Atom support to &man.hwpmc.4;. 800056 November 29, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the introduction of multi-/no-IPv4/v6 jails. 800057 December 1, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the switch to the ath hal source code. 800058 December 12, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the introduction of the VOP_VPTOCNP operation. 800059 December 15, 2008 8.0-CURRENT incorporates the new arp-v2 rewrite. 800060 December 19, 2008 8.0-CURRENT after the addition of makefs. 800061 January 15, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after TCP Appropriate Byte Counting. 800062 January 28, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after removal of minor(), minor2unit(), unit2minor(), etc. 800063 February 18, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after GENERIC config change to use the USB2 stack, but also the addition of fdevname(3). 800064 February 23, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after the USB2 stack is moved to and replaces dev/usb. 800065 February 26, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after the renaming of all functions in libmp(3). 800066 February 27, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after changing USB devfs handling and layout. 800067 February 28, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after adding getdelim(), getline(), stpncpy(), strnlen(), wcsnlen(), wcscasecmp(), and wcsncasecmp(). 800068 March 2, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after renaming the ushub devclass to uhub. 800069 March 9, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after libusb20.so.1 was renamed to libusb.so.1. 800070 March 9, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after merging IGMPv3 and Source-Specific Multicast (SSM) to the IPv4 stack. 800071 March 14, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after gcc was patched to use C99 inline semantics in c99 and gnu99 mode. 800072 March 15, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after the IFF_NEEDSGIANT flag has been removed; non-MPSAFE network device drivers are no longer supported. 800073 March 18, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after the dynamic string token substitution has been implemented for rpath and needed pathes. 800074 March 24, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after tcpdump 4.0.0 and libpcap 1.0.0 import. 800075 April 6, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after layout of structs vnet_net, vnet_inet and vnet_ipfw has been changed. 800076 April 9, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after adding delay profiles in dummynet. 800077 April 14, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after removing VOP_LEASE() and vop_vector.vop_lease. 800078 April 15, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after struct rt_weight fields have been added to struct rt_metrics and struct rt_metrics_lite, changing the layout of struct rt_metrics_lite. A bump to RTM_VERSION was made, but backed out. 800079 April 15, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after struct llentry pointers are added to struct route and struct route_in6. 800080 April 15, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after layout of struct inpcb has been changed. 800081 April 19, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after the layout of struct malloc_type has been changed. 800082 April 21, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after the layout of struct ifnet has changed, and with if_ref() and if_rele() ifnet refcounting. 800083 April 22, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after the implementation of a low-level Bluetooth HCI API. 800084 April 29, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after IPv6 SSM and MLDv2 changes. 800085 April 30, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after enabling support for VIMAGE kernel builds with one active image. 800086 May 8, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after adding support for input lines of arbitrarily length in patch(1). 800087 May 11, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after some VFS KPI changes. The thread argument has been removed from the FSD parts of the VFS. VFS_* functions do not need the context any more because it always refers to curthread. In some special cases, the old behavior is retained. 800088 May 20, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after net80211 monitor mode changes. 800089 May 23, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after adding UDP control block support. 800090 May 23, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after virtualizing interface cloning. 800091 May 27, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after adding hierarchical jails and removing global securelevel. 800092 May 29, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after chaning sx_init_flags() KPI. The SX_ADAPTIVESPIN is retired and a new SX_NOADAPTIVE flag is introduced in order to handle the reversed logic. 800093 May 29, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after adding mnt_xflag to struct mount. 800094 May 30, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after adding &man.VOP.ACCESSX.9;. 800095 May 30, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after changing the polling KPI. The polling handlers now return the number of packets processed. A new IFCAP_POLLING_NOCOUNT is also introduced to specify that the return value is not significant and the counting should be skipped. 800096 June 1, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after updating to the new netisr implementation and after changing the way we store and access FIBs. 800097 June 8, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after the introduction of vnet destructor hooks and infrastructure. 800097 June 11, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after the introduction of netgraph outbound to inbound path call detection and queuing, which also changed the layout of struct thread. 800098 June 14, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after OpenSSL 0.9.8k import. 800099 June 22, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after NGROUPS update and moving route virtualization into its own VImage module. 800100 June 24, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after SYSVIPC ABI change. 800101 June 29, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after the removal of the /dev/net/* per-interface character devices. 800102 July 12, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after padding was added to struct sackhint, struct tcpcb, and struct tcpstat. 800103 July 13, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after replacing struct tcpopt with struct toeopt in the TOE driver interface to the TCP syncache. 800104 July 14, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after the addition of the linker-set based per-vnet allocator. 800105 July 19, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after version bump for all shared libraries that do not have symbol versioning turned on. 800106 July 24, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after introduction of OBJT_SG VM object type. 800107 August 2, 2009 8.0-CURRENT after making the newbus subsystem Giant free by adding the newbus sxlock and 8.0-RELEASE. 800108 November 21, 2009 8.0-STABLE after implementing EVFILT_USER kevent filter. 800500 January 7, 2010 8.0-STABLE after __FreeBSD_version bump to make pkg_add -r use packages-8-stable. 800501 January 24, 2010 8.0-STABLE after change of the scandir(3) and alphasort(3) prototypes to conform to SUSv4. 800502 January 31, 2010 8.0-STABLE after addition of sigpause(3). 800503 February 25, 2010 8.0-STABLE after addition of SIOCGIFDESCR and SIOCSIFDESCR ioctls to network interfaces. These ioctl can be used to manipulate interface description, as inspired by OpenBSD. 800504 March 1, 2010 8.0-STABLE after MFC of importing x86emu, a software emulator for real mode x86 CPU from OpenBSD. 800505 May 18, 2010 8.0-STABLE after MFC of adding liblzma, xz, xzdec, and lzmainfo. 801000 June 14, 2010 8.1-RELEASE 801500 June 14, 2010 8.1-STABLE after 8.1-RELEASE. 900000 August 22, 2009 9.0-CURRENT. 900001 September 8, 2009 9.0-CURRENT after importing x86emu, a software emulator for real mode x86 CPU from OpenBSD. 900002 September 23, 2009 9.0-CURRENT after implementing the EVFILT_USER kevent filter functionality. 900003 December 2, 2009 9.0-CURRENT after addition of sigpause(3) and PIE support in csu. 900004 December 6, 2009 9.0-CURRENT after addition of libulog and its libutempter compatibility interface. 900005 December 12, 2009 9.0-CURRENT after addition of sleepq_sleepcnt(), which can be used to query the number of waiters on a specific waiting queue. 900006 January 4, 2010 9.0-CURRENT after change of the scandir(3) and alphasort(3) prototypes to conform to SUSv4. 900007 January 13, 2010 9.0-CURRENT after the removal of utmp(5) and the addition of utmpx (see getutxent(3)) for improved logging of user logins and system events. 900008 January 20, 2010 9.0-CURRENT after the import of BSDL bc/dc and the deprecation of GNU bc/dc. 900009 January 26, 2010 9.0-CURRENT after the addition of SIOCGIFDESCR and SIOCSIFDESCR ioctls to network interfaces. These ioctl can be used to manipulate interface description, as inspired by OpenBSD. 900010 March 22, 2010 9.0-CURRENT after the import of zlib 1.2.4. 900011 April 24, 2010 9.0-CURRENT after adding soft-updates journalling. 900012 May 10, 2010 9.0-CURRENT after adding liblzma, xz, xzdec, and lzmainfo. 900013 May 24, 2010 9.0-CURRENT after bringing in USB fixes for linux(4). 900014 Jun 10, 2010 9.0-CURRENT after adding Clang. 900015 July 22, 2010 9.0-CURRENT after the import of BSD grep.
Note that 2.2-STABLE sometimes identifies itself as 2.2.5-STABLE after the 2.2.5-RELEASE. The pattern used to be year followed by the month, but we decided to change it to a more straightforward major/minor system starting from 2.2. This is because the parallel development on several branches made it infeasible to classify the releases simply by their real release dates. If you are making a port now, you do not have to worry about old -CURRENTs; they are listed here just for your reference. Writing something after <filename>bsd.port.mk</filename> Do not write anything after the .include <bsd.port.mk> line. It usually can be avoided by including bsd.port.pre.mk somewhere in the middle of your Makefile and bsd.port.post.mk at the end. You need to include either the bsd.port.pre.mk/bsd.port.post.mk pair or bsd.port.mk only; do not mix these two usages. bsd.port.pre.mk only defines a few variables, which can be used in tests in the Makefile, bsd.port.post.mk defines the rest. Here are some important variables defined in bsd.port.pre.mk (this is not the complete list, please read bsd.port.mk for the complete list). Variable Description ARCH The architecture as returned by uname -m (e.g., i386) OPSYS The operating system type, as returned by uname -s (e.g., FreeBSD) OSREL The release version of the operating system (e.g., 2.1.5 or 2.2.7) OSVERSION The numeric version of the operating system; the same as __FreeBSD_version. PORTOBJFORMAT The object format of the system (elf or aout; note that for modern versions of FreeBSD, aout is deprecated.) LOCALBASE The base of the local tree (e.g., /usr/local/) PREFIX Where the port installs itself (see more on PREFIX). If you have to define the variables USE_IMAKE, USE_X_PREFIX, or MASTERDIR, do so before including bsd.port.pre.mk. Here are some examples of things you can write after bsd.port.pre.mk: # no need to compile lang/perl5 if perl5 is already in system .if ${OSVERSION} > 300003 BROKEN= perl is in system .endif # only one shlib version number for ELF .if ${PORTOBJFORMAT} == "elf" TCL_LIB_FILE= ${TCL_LIB}.${SHLIB_MAJOR} .else TCL_LIB_FILE= ${TCL_LIB}.${SHLIB_MAJOR}.${SHLIB_MINOR} .endif # software already makes link for ELF, but not for a.out post-install: .if ${PORTOBJFORMAT} == "aout" ${LN} -sf liblinpack.so.1.0 ${PREFIX}/lib/liblinpack.so .endif You did remember to use tab instead of spaces after BROKEN= and TCL_LIB_FILE=, did you not? :-). Use the <function>exec</function> statement in wrapper scripts If the port installs a shell script whose purpose is to launch another program, and if launching that program is the last action performed by the script, make sure to launch the program using the exec statement, for instance: #!/bin/sh exec %%LOCALBASE%%/bin/java -jar %%DATADIR%%/foo.jar "$@" The exec statement replaces the shell process with the specified program. If exec is omitted, the shell process remains in memory while the program is executing, and needlessly consumes system resources. Do things rationally The Makefile should do things simply and reasonably. If you can make it a couple of lines shorter or more readable, then do so. Examples include using a make .if construct instead of a shell if construct, not redefining do-extract if you can redefine EXTRACT* instead, and using GNU_CONFIGURE instead of CONFIGURE_ARGS += --prefix=${PREFIX}. If you find yourself having to write a lot of new code to try to do something, please go back and review bsd.port.mk to see if it contains an existing implementation of what you are trying to do. While hard to read, there are a great many seemingly-hard problems for which bsd.port.mk already provides a shorthand solution. Respect both <makevar>CC</makevar> and <makevar>CXX</makevar> The port should respect both CC and CXX variables. What we mean by this is that the port should not set the values of these variables absolutely, overriding existing values; instead, it should append whatever values it needs to the existing values. This is so that build options that affect all ports can be set globally. If the port does not respect these variables, please add NO_PACKAGE=ignores either cc or cxx to the Makefile. An example of a Makefile respecting both CC and CXX variables follows. Note the ?=: CC?= gcc CXX?= g++ Here is an example which respects neither CC nor CXX variables: CC= gcc CXX= g++ Both CC and CXX variables can be defined on FreeBSD systems in /etc/make.conf. The first example defines a value if it was not previously set in /etc/make.conf, preserving any system-wide definitions. The second example clobbers anything previously defined. Respect <makevar>CFLAGS</makevar> The port should respect the CFLAGS variable. What we mean by this is that the port should not set the value of this variable absolutely, overriding the existing value; instead, it should append whatever values it needs to the existing value. This is so that build options that affect all ports can be set globally. If it does not, please add NO_PACKAGE=ignores cflags to the Makefile. An example of a Makefile respecting the CFLAGS variable follows. Note the +=: CFLAGS+= -Wall -Werror Here is an example which does not respect the CFLAGS variable: CFLAGS= -Wall -Werror The CFLAGS variable is defined on FreeBSD systems in /etc/make.conf. The first example appends additional flags to the CFLAGS variable, preserving any system-wide definitions. The second example clobbers anything previously defined. You should remove optimization flags from the third party Makefiles. System CFLAGS contains system-wide optimization flags. An example from an unmodified Makefile: CFLAGS= -O3 -funroll-loops -DHAVE_SOUND Using system optimization flags, the Makefile would look similar to the following example: CFLAGS+= -DHAVE_SOUND Threading libraries The threading library must be linked to the binaries using a special linker flag -pthread on &os;. If a port insists on linking -lpthread or -lc_r directly, patch it to use PTHREAD_LIBS variable provided by the ports framework. This variable usually has the value of -pthread, but on certain architectures and &os; versions it can have different values, so do not just hardcode -pthread into patches and always use PTHREAD_LIBS. If building the port errors out with unrecognized option '-pthread' when setting PTHREAD_LIBS, it may be desirable to use gcc as linker by setting CONFIGURE_ENV to LD=${CC}. The -pthread option is not supported by ld directly. Feedback Do send applicable changes/patches to the original author/maintainer for inclusion in next release of the code. This will only make your job that much easier for the next release. <filename>README.html</filename> Do not include the README.html file. This file is not part of the cvs collection but is generated using the make readme command. Marking a port not installable with <makevar>BROKEN</makevar>, <makevar>FORBIDDEN</makevar>, or <makevar>IGNORE</makevar> In certain cases users should be prevented from installing a port. To tell a user that a port should not be installed, there are several make variables that can be used in a port's Makefile. The value of the following make variables will be the reason that is given back to users for why the port refuses to install itself. Please use the correct make variable as each make variable conveys radically different meanings to both users, and to automated systems that depend on the Makefiles, such as the ports build cluster, FreshPorts, and portsmon. Variables BROKEN is reserved for ports that currently do not compile, install, or deinstall correctly. It should be used for ports where the problem is believed to be temporary. If instructed, the build cluster will still attempt to try to build them to see if the underlying problem has been resolved. (However, in general, the cluster is run without this.) For instance, use BROKEN when a port: does not compile fails its configuration or installation process installs files outside of ${LOCALBASE} does not remove all its files cleanly upon deinstall (however, it may be acceptable, and desirable, for the port to leave user-modified files behind) FORBIDDEN is used for ports that do contain a security vulnerability or induce grave concern regarding the security of a FreeBSD system with a given port installed (ex: a reputably insecure program or a program that provides easily exploitable services). Ports should be marked as FORBIDDEN as soon as a particular piece of software has a vulnerability and there is no released upgrade. Ideally ports should be upgraded as soon as possible when a security vulnerability is discovered so as to reduce the number of vulnerable FreeBSD hosts (we like being known for being secure), however sometimes there is a noticeable time gap between disclosure of a vulnerability and an updated release of the vulnerable software. Do not mark a port FORBIDDEN for any reason other than security. IGNORE is reserved for ports that should not be built for some other reason. It should be used for ports where the problem is believed to be structural. The build cluster will not, under any circumstances, build ports marked as IGNORE. For instance, use IGNORE when a port: compiles but does not run properly does not work on the installed version of &os; requires &os; kernel sources to build, but the user does not have them installed has a distfile which may not be automatically fetched due to licensing restrictions does not work with some other currently installed port (for instance, the port depends on www/apache21 but www/apache13 is installed) If a port would conflict with a currently installed port (for example, if they install a file in the same - place that perfoms a different function), + place that performs a different function), use CONFLICTS instead. CONFLICTS will set IGNORE by itself. If a port should be marked IGNORE only on certain architectures, there are two other convenience variables that will automatically set IGNORE for you: ONLY_FOR_ARCHS and NOT_FOR_ARCHS. Examples: ONLY_FOR_ARCHS= i386 amd64 NOT_FOR_ARCHS= alpha ia64 sparc64 A custom IGNORE message can be set using ONLY_FOR_ARCHS_REASON and NOT_FOR_ARCHS_REASON. Per architecture entries are possible with ONLY_FOR_ARCHS_REASON_ARCH and NOT_FOR_ARCHS_REASON_ARCH. If a port fetches i386 binaries and installs them, IA32_BINARY_PORT should be set. If this variable is set, it will be checked whether the /usr/lib32 directory is available for IA32 versions of libraries and whether the kernel has IA32 compatibility compiled in. If one of these two dependencies is not satisfied, IGNORE will be set automatically. Implementation Notes The strings should not be quoted. Also, the wording of the string should be somewhat different due to the way the information is shown to the user. Examples: BROKEN= this port is unsupported on FreeBSD 5.x IGNORE= is unsupported on FreeBSD 5.x resulting in the following output from make describe: ===> foobar-0.1 is marked as broken: this port is unsupported on FreeBSD 5.x. ===> foobar-0.1 is unsupported on FreeBSD 5.x. Marking a port for removal with <makevar>DEPRECATED</makevar> or <makevar>EXPIRATION_DATE</makevar> Do remember that BROKEN and FORBIDDEN are to be used as a temporary resort if a port is not working. Permanently broken ports should be removed from the tree entirely. When it makes sense to do so, users can be warned about a pending port removal with DEPRECATED and EXPIRATION_DATE. The former is simply a string stating why the port is scheduled for removal; the latter is a string in ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD). Both will be shown to the user. It is possible to set DEPRECATED without an EXPIRATION_DATE (for instance, recommending a newer version of the port), but the converse does not make any sense. There is no set policy on how much notice to give. Current practice seems to be one month for security-related issues and two months for build issues. This also gives any interested committers a little time to fix the problems. Avoid use of the <literal>.error</literal> construct The correct way for a Makefile to signal that the port can not be installed due to some external factor (for instance, the user has specified an illegal - combination of build options) is to set a nonblank value to + combination of build options) is to set a non-blank value to IGNORE. This value will be formatted and shown to the user by make install. It is a common mistake to use .error for this purpose. The problem with this is that many automated tools that work with the ports tree will fail in this situation. The most common occurrence of this is seen when trying to build /usr/ports/INDEX (see ). However, even more trivial commands such as make maintainer also fail in this scenario. This is not acceptable. How to avoid using <literal>.error</literal> Assume that someone has the line USE_POINTYHAT=yes in make.conf. The first of the next two Makefile snippets will cause make index to fail, while the second one will not: .if USE_POINTYHAT .error "POINTYHAT is not supported" .endif .if USE_POINTYHAT IGNORE=POINTYHAT is not supported .endif Usage of <filename>sysctl</filename> The usage of sysctl is discouraged except in targets. This is because the evaluation of any makevars, such as used during make index, then has to run the command, further slowing down that process. Usage of &man.sysctl.8; should always be done with the SYSCTL variable, as it contains the fully qualified path and can be overridden, if one has such a special need. Rerolling distfiles Sometimes the authors of software change the content of released distfiles without changing the file's name. You have to verify that the changes are official and have been performed by the author. It has happened in the past that the distfile was silently altered on the download servers with the intent to cause harm or compromise end user security. Put the old distfile aside, download the new one, unpack them and compare the content with &man.diff.1;. If you see nothing suspicious, you can update distinfo. Be sure to summarize the differences in your PR or commit log, so that other people know that you have taken care to ensure that nothing bad has happened. You might also want to contact the authors of the software and confirm the changes with them. Necessary workarounds Sometimes it is necessary to work around bugs in software included with older versions of &os;. Some versions of &man.make.1; were broken on at least 4.8 and 5.0 with respect to handling comparisons based on OSVERSION. This would often lead to failures during make describe (and thus, the overall ports make index). The workaround is to enclose the conditional comparison in spaces, e.g.: if ( ${OSVERSION} > 500023 ) Be aware that test-installing a port on 4.9 or 5.2 will not detect this problem. Miscellanea The files pkg-descr and pkg-plist should each be double-checked. If you are reviewing a port and feel they can be worded better, do so. Do not copy more copies of the GNU General Public License into our system, please. Please be careful to note any legal issues! Do not let us illegally distribute software! A Sample <filename>Makefile</filename> Here is a sample Makefile that you can use to create a new port. Make sure you remove all the extra comments (ones between brackets)! It is recommended that you follow this format (ordering of variables, empty lines between sections, etc.). This format is designed so that the most important information is easy to locate. We recommend that you use portlint to check the Makefile. [the header...just to make it easier for us to identify the ports.] # New ports collection makefile for: xdvi [the "version required" line is only needed when the PORTVERSION variable is not specific enough to describe the port.] # Date created: 26 May 1995 [this is the person who did the original port to FreeBSD, in particular, the person who wrote the first version of this Makefile. Remember, this should not be changed when upgrading the port later.] # Whom: Satoshi Asami <asami@FreeBSD.org> # # $FreeBSD$ [ ^^^^^^^^^ This will be automatically replaced with RCS ID string by CVS when it is committed to our repository. If upgrading a port, do not alter this line back to "$FreeBSD$". CVS deals with it automatically.] # [section to describe the port itself and the master site - PORTNAME and PORTVERSION are always first, followed by CATEGORIES, and then MASTER_SITES, which can be followed by MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR. PKGNAMEPREFIX and PKGNAMESUFFIX, if needed, will be after that. Then comes DISTNAME, EXTRACT_SUFX and/or DISTFILES, and then EXTRACT_ONLY, as necessary.] PORTNAME= xdvi PORTVERSION= 18.2 CATEGORIES= print [do not forget the trailing slash ("/")! if you are not using MASTER_SITE_* macros] MASTER_SITES= ${MASTER_SITE_XCONTRIB} MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR= applications PKGNAMEPREFIX= ja- DISTNAME= xdvi-pl18 [set this if the source is not in the standard ".tar.gz" form] EXTRACT_SUFX= .tar.Z [section for distributed patches -- can be empty] PATCH_SITES= ftp://ftp.sra.co.jp/pub/X11/japanese/ PATCHFILES= xdvi-18.patch1.gz xdvi-18.patch2.gz [maintainer; *mandatory*! This is the person who is volunteering to handle port updates, build breakages, and to whom a users can direct questions and bug reports. To keep the quality of the Ports Collection as high as possible, we no longer accept new ports that are assigned to "ports@FreeBSD.org".] MAINTAINER= asami@FreeBSD.org COMMENT= A DVI Previewer for the X Window System [dependencies -- can be empty] RUN_DEPENDS= gs:${PORTSDIR}/print/ghostscript LIB_DEPENDS= Xpm.5:${PORTSDIR}/graphics/xpm [this section is for other standard bsd.port.mk variables that do not belong to any of the above] [If it asks questions during configure, build, install...] IS_INTERACTIVE= yes [If it extracts to a directory other than ${DISTNAME}...] WRKSRC= ${WRKDIR}/xdvi-new [If the distributed patches were not made relative to ${WRKSRC}, you may need to tweak this] PATCH_DIST_STRIP= -p1 [If it requires a "configure" script generated by GNU autoconf to be run] GNU_CONFIGURE= yes [If it requires GNU make, not /usr/bin/make, to build...] USE_GMAKE= yes [If it is an X application and requires "xmkmf -a" to be run...] USE_IMAKE= yes [et cetera.] [non-standard variables to be used in the rules below] MY_FAVORITE_RESPONSE= "yeah, right" [then the special rules, in the order they are called] pre-fetch: i go fetch something, yeah post-patch: i need to do something after patch, great pre-install: and then some more stuff before installing, wow [and then the epilogue] .include <bsd.port.mk> Keeping Up The &os; Ports Collection is constantly changing. Here is some information on how to keep up. FreshPorts One of the easiest ways to learn about updates that have already been committed is by subscribing to FreshPorts. You can select multiple ports to monitor. Maintainers are strongly encouraged to subscribe, because they will receive notification of not only their own changes, but also any changes that any other &os; committer has made. (These are often necessary to keep up with changes in the underlying ports framework—although it would be most polite to receive an advance heads-up from those committing such changes, sometimes this is overlooked or just simply impractical. Also, in some cases, the changes are very minor in nature. We expect everyone to use their best judgement in these cases.) If you wish to use FreshPorts, all you need is an account. If your registered email address is @FreeBSD.org, you will see the opt-in link on the right hand side of the webpages. For those of you who already have a FreshPorts account, but are not using your @FreeBSD.org email address, just change your email to @FreeBSD.org, subscribe, then change it back again. FreshPorts also has a sanity test feature which automatically tests each commit to the FreeBSD ports tree. If subscribed to this service, you will be notified of any errors which FreshPorts detects during sanity testing of your commits. The Web Interface to the Source Repository It is possible to browse the files in the source repository by using a web interface. Changes that affect the entire port system are now documented in the CHANGES file. Changes that affect individual ports are now documented in the UPDATING file. However, the definitive answer to any question is undoubtedly to read the source code of bsd.port.mk, and associated files. The &os; Ports Mailing List If you maintain ports, you should consider following the &a.ports;. Important changes to the way ports work will be announced there, and then committed to CHANGES. The &os; Port Building Cluster on <hostid role="hostname">pointyhat.FreeBSD.org</hostid> One of the least-publicized strengths of &os; is that an entire cluster of machines is dedicated to continually building the Ports Collection, for each of the major OS releases and for each Tier-1 architecture. You can find the results of these builds at package building logs and errors. Individual ports are built unless they are specifically marked with IGNORE. Ports that are marked with BROKEN will still be attempted, to see if the underlying problem has been resolved. (This is done by passing TRYBROKEN to the port's Makefile.) The &os; Ports Distfile Scanner The build cluster is dedicated to building the latest release of each port with distfiles that have already been fetched. However, as the Internet continually changes, distfiles can quickly go missing. The FreeBSD Ports distfile scanner attempts to query every download site for every port to find out if each distfile is still currently available. Maintainers are asked to check this report periodically, not only to speed up the building process for users, but to help avoid wasting bandwidth of the sites that volunteer to host all these distfiles. The &os; Ports Monitoring System Another handy resource is the FreeBSD Ports Monitoring System (also known as portsmon). This system comprises a database that processes information from several sources and allows its to be browsed via a web interface. Currently, the ports Problem Reports (PRs), the error logs from the build cluster, and individual files from the ports collection are used. In the future, this will be expanded to include the distfile survey, as well as other sources. To get started, you can view all information about a particular port by using the Overview of One Port. As of this writing, this is the only resource available that maps GNATS PR entries to portnames. (PR submitters do not always include the portname in their Synopsis, although we would prefer that they did.) So, portsmon is a good place to start if you want to find out whether an existing port has any PRs filed against it and/or any build errors; or, to find out if a new port that you may be thinking about creating has already been submitted.