Porting Practice

[Brandon helsley]

I have gotten a couple of emails from portscout about ports that need updated and maintained. Before I go about updating and maintaining these ports I wanted to do some practice on a couple that I use like x11/nvidia-settings. I have recieved alot of help on the forums and from the documentation, but i'm still at a loss as to how the diff process works. Also, i've gotten stuck at a few spots along the way. I use svn to checkout a copy of the nvidia-settings port which has no maintainer. The copy goes into my root directory either in a work directory or not. After I make the changes to the files and issue the command...

MAKE CONFIG:root at machine17:/usr/ports/x11/nvidia-settings # make config
===> No options to configure

make patch and make configure both work.

PORTLINT:root at machine17:/usr/ports/x11/nvidia-settings # portlint
WARN: Makefile: Consider adding support for a NLS knob to conditionally disable gettext support.
0 fatal errors and 1 warning found.

So once I get past this point and have succesfully tested the port with portlint and poudriere testport, I'm confused as to how I am supposed to build the package, and create a suitable diff to patch the port either with svn or diff -u.

The documentation for (diff -u) says "To create a suitable diff for a single patch, copy the file that needs patching to something.orig, save the changes to something and then create the patch:"
% diff -u something.orig something > something.diff

Im not sure really the meaning of this documentation. What file needs patching, which file to copy, where to save changes to exactly, and how and why the svn method is different. Which method should I choose? I know it says that unified diff and svn are preffered but since I am new maybe the (diff -u) command would be easier to begin with? Please help and include anything that's relevant even if i didn't mention it. I'm really excited to get started and will absorb like a sponge any know how that's offered!!!

One last thing. I have not attempted a poudriere testport today but for the last ten or so times I have tried, my computer shuts down after a few minutes of testing. Is this a overheating or is it some kind of another problem?