question about ports

[Jens Rehsack]

Antoine Jacoutot wrote:

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> Hello :)
> 
> I have 2 questions concerning the ports.
> 
> 1. I need to apply a patch to a port so my modem could work with 
> mgetty+sendfax; how do I do that ? Do I have to edit the Makefile or 
> pass options to the make command ?

That's quite easy. See FreeBSD Porter's Handbook at 
<http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/>

Than you should check where your patch is to be applied to, either to 
the port (eg. for upgrading or fix fbsd specific behaviour) or to the 
original sources? If you can answer the first question with true, you 
should patch the according files, you know which. If the second answer 
is true, you should send your patches to the author/mailing list of the 
original sources.

Just to give you an example.
a) If I want to have the FreeBSD php4-port is able to work with thttpd,
    I have to update the lang/php4/Makefile and lang/php4/bsd.php.mk to
    recognize a new flag for the port and choosing it's dependencies
    right. This patch I will send to the FreeBSD Gnats database and to
    the ports maintainer using send-pr(1).
b) If I want php - just as example - be able to use libpopt (option
    parsing library, better than getopt()), I have to patch php and
    please the php developers to include the patch into the next release.

Is it clear so far? If not, feel free to ask again :-)

> 2. Can I have a port directory, like /usr/ports/personnal (or in another 
> place), of my own that I can add to the regular ports tree ?

Yes, on you own machine you can have each directory you want. If you 
want to change something in the ports structure, you should ask the 
PortManagers at portmgr at freebsd.org and substantiate your requirement.

> Thanks in advance for your answer.
> 

Hope it helps a little bit.
Jens