revving a dead port

[Hakisho Nukama]

On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 5:45 AM, Aryeh Friedman
<aryeh.friedman at gmail.com> wrote:
> My company is the original author devel/thistest and we have removed
> the need for the web based download (thus making it buildable)... the
> original maintainer (not us) is long gone and we want to re-release
> the code under a license that allows complete distribution freedom...
> I personally am also the maintainer of devel/aegis and devel/tailor
> but for trivial modifications when taking the port over I have never
> really worked with the port system and need advice on how to make a
> port from scratch
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You could start from editing the old port, files remain in version control
under Attic:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/devel/thistest/Attic/

I test and create ports inside a jail, so that I spot missed dependencies,
you could register at https://redports.org where a clean environment is
used to test a build and also share your preliminary work in subversion.

Fist thing to do - for me - is to make the distfiles fetch-able, so that
I can try to build it from scratch.
Normally I use a Makefile from another similar port and modify
PORTNAME, PORTVERSION, MASTER_SITES and DISTFILES
accordingly while deleting unneeded stuff..

After that I search for needed dependencies and include them in
BUILD_DEPENDS, LIB_DEPENDS and RUN_DEPENDS.
freshports.org has a nice feature, that lets you search for ports
with a dependency on a specific port.
http://www.freshports.org/search.php?stype=depends_all&query=
You might follow the link CVSWeb on freshports and look into the
Makefile to copy the right DEPENDS line to your Makefile.

>From this point on it gets specific for each port and I would recommend
to dig into
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/book.html
for further reference.

Best Regards,
Hakisho Nukama