Of LSOF

[Kevin Oberman]

On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 3:47 PM, Doug Hardie <bc979 at lafn.org> wrote:

> > On 27 December 2017, at 13:26, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 26 Dec 2017, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> >
> >> [...] Putting header files into the port is a non-starter as they MUST
> match the kernel on which lsof is built. I added lsof to PORTS_MODULES so
> it is rebuilt with any new kernel on my stable system and on one release
> system so I can use that package to install elsewhere rather then use the
> repo package.
> >
> > Good point; thanks.  "lsof" is a superb tool, BTW...
> >
> >> Now that 10.3 is EOL I would expect that the package built for
> 10-STABLE would be built on 10.4-RELEASE, but I don't know for sure. It
> should be and the next quarterly should be 10.4 based, too.
> >
> > OK.
> >
> > The history is that I used to build from ports because the then-boss
> did, and I didn't even know about pre-built packages.  Then, one day, Ruby
> needed to be rebuilt, which promptly blew away /tmp i.e. swap...  I'm a big
> fan of TMPFS; I had it on the old BSDi box (where it was "mfs"), and even
> my old CP/M box (where it was "M:").
>
> Why not add losf to the base?  Its a useful tool like ping, traceroute etc.


While I can't say the exact reason, though I'd guess that it might be a
licensing issue, though the license is very similar to a BSD license.
Another possible issue is that lsof is frequently updated and that would
mean that the version in FreeBSD base would get fairly old before EOL.

fstat(1) does much of what lsof does.
--
Kevin Oberman, Part time kid herder and retired Network Engineer
E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com
PGP Fingerprint: D03FB98AFA78E3B78C1694B318AB39EF1B055683