cvsup newbie questions

Joshua Tinnin krinklyfig at spymac.com
Fri Dec 17 17:46:10 PST 2004


On Friday 17 December 2004 03:44 pm, Nikolas Britton 
<freebsd at nbritton.org> wrote:
> Tom Connolly wrote:
> >Do a "make BATCH=yes install clean"
> >
> >Then it is set for all meta ports as well.  I had to find this out
> > the hard way.  It took 3 days to install Gnome.  I kept coming back
> > to a menu configuration screen.
> >
> >Tom
>
> Yes I kinda guess that it was a make option (the small "yes" gave it
> away) but how does it know what make options I what compiled in? and
> the same for meta-ports, when there's crap loads of programs
> installed (gnome)? For example, how would it know that I wanted to
> build firefox with -O2 and newicons options?

Well, if you build a port with make options once, then it will remember 
your make options. Otherwise, you can enter make arguments 
in /etc/pkgtools.conf, although this only helps if you know what 
arguments the ports you're installing might need.

> I'm guessing when 
> installing a single port it would be easy to look at the make file
> and set the make options you want (like make FOOBAR=yes BATCH=yes
> install clean) but there's not much sense in doing that for a single
> port install, I don't understand how I would set the make options for
> a meta-port let alone even find them all with all the ports that get
> installed when doing meta ports, heck, on my computer alone theres
> 332 ports installed, I'm still trying to figure them all out so I can
> set them in portupgrades config file, how do I manage all this crap??

Well, I do understand, as there's a lot of stuff that gets installed 
with many meta-ports for dependency reasons that you probably don't 
need all that much, but some of it you do need. Some of it is just 
libraries, and others are applications that don't have any other 
purpose but to do something really simple, but many programs need it, 
while others are programming languages that some programs are written 
in.

> and on top of that I don't even know what 4/5th's of those ports are
> even for. and why can't we have statically linked (or what ever its
> called) so we don't have to install all these f'ing build and run
> time dependencies and have every thing linked to everything else,
> hard drive space is not an issue now a days?

Well, that's an issue with the developers of those various ports and 
sometimes the committers, and I grant that the ports system isn't 
perfect, but, honestly, it's a good idea to at least be familiar with 
the purpose of what's installed on your system, even if you don't have 
it all memorized. Like you can do a pkg_info -a and read up on what you 
don't understand. Yes, there's a lot there (you don't have to read it 
all at once), but FreeBSD is also not necessarily meant to be used 
carelessly. What I mean is that, while it's frustrating sometimes to 
scrutinize all the ports in a meta-port, or even all the installed 
ports on your system, it's a good idea to know what's going on with 
your system, particularly before you make changes to it by installing 
software.

- jt


> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: Nikolas Britton [mailto:freebsd at nbritton.org]
> >Sent: Friday, December 17, 2004 3:17 PM
> >To: Tom Connolly
> >Cc: 'Joshua Lokken'; 'Kevin Smith'; freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> >Subject: Re: cvsup newbie questions
> >
> >Tom Connolly wrote:
> >>[snip]
> >>If you want to install the latest version of gnome, you should
> >> cvsup the ports tree (ports-all), then cd into the directory for
> >> the gnome meta-port (it builds gnome and alot of associated apps)
> >> and build it, like so:
> >>
> >># cd /usr/ports/x11/gnome2
> >># make install clean
> >
> >there is also gnome2-lite, gnome2-fifth-toe, gnome2-office, and
> >gnome2-power-tools
> >
> >>Make sure you set BATCH=yes or when you get home you will have a
> >> very annoying configuration menu on your screen asking you what
> >> you want to install.
> >
> >set BATCH=yes where and what does it do with the optional make
> > options, esp for meta ports?


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