how to get the list of files installed by port, without installing it

[Alexander Leidinger]

On Sun, 27 Nov 2005 13:05:41 +0200
Vasil Dimov <vd at datamax.bg> wrote:

> Hi, all
> 
> How to get the list of files installed by port, without installing it?
> 
> This question my seem easy to answer, but actually is not.

You are right.

> pkg-plist gives some approach, but there are a lot of %%VARIABLES%% I
> want to get substituted in it, also some ports do not have pkg-plist and
> define PLIST_FILES and PLIST_DIRS. After some digging I discovered the
> generate-plist target. ``make generate-plist'' is really elegant
> one-line solution, but using it to solve my problem has a few flaws:
> 1. some ports (say benchmarks/lmbench) expect the archive to be unpacked
> 2. some ports generate dynamic lists like after installing doing
>    something like find /specific/dir >> plist. This is really
>    unresolvable without having the distfile(s)
> 3. it is somehow slow, doing it for all the ports takes 2-3 times more
>    than ``make index''
> 
> If I do not find something better I will use generate-plist and
> ignore/workaround the above flaws.

There's no better way.

Unfortunately some maintainers prefer to use plists which are generated
at install time, even if this is not necessary for their ports. For
some complex ports it's ok to generate the plist at install time, since
they are very complex and getting the plist right for all cases is not
easy. There was a thread here on ports@ which listed all drawbacks of
those ports with install-time generated plists and the benefits of
those ports which come with a plist in the Makefile or as a separate
file. Those commit-time plists are preferred by the majority of the
ports committers. Unfortunately unnecessary install-time plists get
still committed.

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
              To boldly go where I surely don't belong.

http://www.Leidinger.net                       Alexander @ Leidinger.net
  GPG fingerprint = C518 BC70 E67F 143F BE91  3365 79E2 9C60 B006 3FE7