Shared /usr/ports directories

Richard Danter richard.danter at ntlworld.com
Thu May 19 10:13:24 PDT 2005


Erik Trulsson wrote:
> On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 05:39:54PM +0100, Richard Danter wrote:
> 
>>Hi all,
>>
>>I have several machines running FBSD now. At the moment I have a 
>>complete ports tree on each machine. I was wondering if it was possible 
>>to have it all on just one machine and NFS mount it?
> 
> 
> That is certainly possible.
> 
> 
>>I have already been doing this for the /usr/ports/distfiles directory, 
>>but had not shared everything else as I was not sure if settings from a 
>>build on one machine may cause problems when building on another machine.
>>
>>Each machine has it's own /etc/make.conf with settings such as the 
>>processor type, so it is important that one build can't effect another.
> 
> 
> I would suggest you set WRKDIRPREFIX in /etc/make.conf so that the
> files built by the ports system do not get placed under /usr/ports but
> somewhere else.

Is it just the object (.o) files that this effects, or all generated 
files? Where do the configurations get saved (for those ports with a 
config menu)?

> For example I have 'WRKDIRPREFIX=/var/workdir' in my /etc/make.conf.
> That way all the files that are created when you build a port ends up
> under /var/workdir rather than under /usr/ports.  If WRKDIRPREFIX is
> set to a directory on a local filesystem there will be no way for a
> build on one system to affect one on another. You should even be able
> to export /usr/ports as read-only.

If it was read-only, where would the source files that usually go into 
/usr/ports/distfiles go? I'd like to only have to download these once too.


> (Changing WKRDIRPREFIX also makes it a lot easier and faster to clean
> up after building ports. Instead of having to issue a 'make clean' for
> each port built, you can just do a 'rm -fr /var/workdir/*' and all the
> workdirs will be removed quickly.)

I usually do a 'make install clean' anyway, but it would be good to be 
able to verify everything is actually cleaned.

The other advantage of all this of course is that I would only need to 
do CVSup once and every machine would be up to date.

Thanks for the help,
Rich



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