A potential new porter seeking some clarifications

[Matthew Seaman]

On 13/12/2018 14:41, Arthur Pirika wrote:
> 1. If I understand correctly, the version of the ports tree as fetched by portsnap isn’t the best for working on the tree. I should instead make another copy of the tree as an svn checkout? Distfiles, however, still go to /usr/ports/distfiles

If you're going to be submitting patches or creating Phabricator 
reviews, then it is definitely recommended that you checkout the ports 
out of either SVN or Git -- whichever you prefer -- and generate your 
diffs against the head of the development tree (eg. by 'svn diff'). 
Although there is a copy of the ports tree available via GitHub, don't 
try using GitHub to create pull requests for the ports.  At worst, no 
one will notice and at best you'll just be asted to re-submit your diff 
as a PR or a Phab. review.

Using one common distfiles location is usually what you'ld want to do in 
order to save on repeated downloads of the same distfiles.

> 2. Is it absolutely necessary to use poudriere before submitting a port? I’m still getting to grips with how it works, and if I need to get comfortable with it first, I’ll do so.

It's absolutely necessary to test your work, and the generally accepted 
way to do that involves using poudriere to do clean-room builds.  Other 
testing methodologies are possible, but generally less effective and 
less convenient.

Don't be frightened of poudriere: it's much easier and nicer to use than 
many people seem to think.  So long as you have sufficient disk space 
and you aren't trying to rebuild the entire ports tree, it can work well 
on a very ordinary desktop machine.

	Cheers,

	Matthew