FreeBSD and Ports in brief (was: Re: ports/89647: Broken link)

Boris Samorodov bsam at ipt.ru
Tue Nov 29 17:16:19 GMT 2005


On Tue, 29 Nov 2005 15:26:20 +0000 (GMT) Joao Borges wrote:

> Excuse-me, but what is PR and MR?

PR is a Problem Report:
http://www.freebsd.org/send-pr.html
man send-pr

ML (not MR) is a Mailing List:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/eresources.html

General notes.
If you plan to use FreeBSD, you should get acquainted with Handbook
and FAQ. You may find them at http://www.freebsd.org or you may
install them at your host!

Mailing lists (freebsd-questions@, freebsd-stable@ and freebsd-ports@
to begin with) are highly recomended to all FreeBSD users.

> Well anyway: I had ports downloaded from the FTP site
> from FreeBSD (The main site) on last week I gess about
> friday november 26th. 

A good starting point to understand ports is:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports-using.html

In brief. Ports are sceletons of the process for getting, installing
and deinstalling of third-party programms to the FreeBSD system. The
repository (main center with current ports) is a very dynamic
one. There are hundreds commits (changes) every day. FTP site has only
those ports (sceletons) which were at the moment when the release is
made. In practice you should use cvsup (or something similar) to have
your ports up to date.

There are many port managers nowadays that help you to deal with
ports. They are *very* helpful. For example, there is a portupgrade
program (sysutils/portupgrade).

As opposed to installing programs from ports there is a packages
system to install pre-compiled progs. The very first package we
install after installing a new FreeBSD system is cvsup:
# pkg_add -r cvsup-without-gui

> I downloaded from the site the acroread7 port and
> tried to make it on my computer Namelly
> acroread7-7.0.1 under print Category. It wasn't able
> to fetch when it came linux-glib2 port under devel
> Category. So I went to the site again an tried to find
> linux-glib2 and tried directly download the source for
> this package (but I couldn't the link is broken). I
> downloaded then just the port and replaced it over the
> freeBSD ftp site one that was previouslly installed.  
> Since this port had the corrected link it fetched. I
> found the same problem   in my linux-atk port and the
> same procedure killed  the problem and acroread7 was
> finally fetched.

Before asking help at freebsd mailing lists (and submitting PR) you
should get the latest ports collection (i.e. by cvsupping) and try to
do your task with the latest ports sceleton.

> But after I pass this all, when I had acroread7
> installed I tried to run the script acroread to see
> the thing, then I discovered it supports only solaris
> and another linux. I tried to force over the other
> linux and I had a driver problem. So I went back to
> the 5 ... 

Yes, we use acroread7 for linux. Before using acroread you should
start linuxolator:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/linuxemu.html

Acroread5 has many security vulnerabilities and will be removed from
ports system soon.

> I would like to follow up this.

There is no need now. Your PR is closed as it was not a real
problem report. Real problem report should contain problems with
*current* ports sources. But not problems you have at a freebsd host
(or server). The latter are discussed at freebsd-ports@ or other
mailing lists.

> thanks

The power to serv. ;-)

> Joao Francisco 


WBR
-- 
Boris B. Samorodov, Research Engineer
InPharmTech Co,     http://www.ipt.ru
Telephone & Internet Service Provider


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