Transferring ports

[Ivan Voras]

On 13/03/2008, Dmitry Marakasov <amdmi3 at amdmi3.ru> wrote:
> * Ivan Voras (ivoras at freebsd.org) wrote:
>
>  > I have an idea and a request for people familiar with ports & pkgdb
>  > infrastructure: a utility (preferably written in C, Python or as a shell
>  > script) that would transfer *installed* ports from one system tree to
>  > the other, including their dependencies. It would transfer only some
>  > ports, specified on the command line.
>  There's no way to do it clearly. Not only such utility will have
>  to deal with dependencies anyway, but also there are ports that do more
>  than just copy files on installation (such as registering uids/gids,
>  handling user-modified configs nicely etc.).

I only need the functionality that now exists by doing "pkg_create -b"
to create a package, and then install it. However "pkg_create -b" does
it, that's how I need it.

>  Actually, I've already had an idea of utility with pretty similar
>  functionality for a long time. The utility would copy directory
>  hierarchies recursively based on file include/exclude list, like this:

>  The purpose is similar - creating jails out of host system in fast
>  and easy way, possibility to strip everything unneeded (useful for
>  secure minimal jails or flash/livecd/embedded installations of
>  minimal size) and add something extra, like stuff from /usr/local
>  without installing full packages in a jail, or, say, copying over
>  additional tree of jail-specific changes (mostly stuff under /etc
>  and /usr/local/etc).

This seems like something that would be also useful to me, if it would
also read pkgdb :).

I need to clarify so people don't flood me with nullfs suggestions: I
don't actually need it for jails, but that was the easiest way for me
to describe it - I need it to set up new installations.