Synth: copying installation to second computer

[Thomas Mueller]

> On 13 June 2017 at 18:01, Thomas Mueller <mueller6722 at twc.com> wrote:

> > I just managed to install (first part) ports-mgmt/synth on FreeBSD 11.1-PRERELEASE amd64, using portmaster after deleting all packages except pkg and portmaster.  Those old packages were no good anyway due to shared libraaries being out of sync.

> >  Now I want to convert packages to synth repository format and copy this installation to another computer with same FreeBSD 11.1-PRERELEASE using NFS, doing as little recompilation as possible.

> >  This is my first (partway) success after an attempt to build synth on FreeBSD-CURRENT amd64, before ino64, was stopped by a system crash and reboot while I was sleeping.

> > I looked through README.md and man synth, but there are still some hazy points.  Or is it easier than I think?

> The thing to note is that ports-mgmt/synth is a repository builder.
> Coming from portupgrade or portmaster, a user may think that it is
> rebuilding too many packages for a simple port change, but what it is
> doing is verifying that the chain of construction for each port is
> working as expected. The first build is always going to be long, but
> will do concurrent builds as much as it much as possible.

> Once you have a complete repo on one of your machines, you can simply
> serve up the /var/synth/live_packages using www/apache24 or even ssh.
> On each of the remote hosts, all you have to do is to add a
> /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/my-local-repo.conf entry, eg:
#
> # Locally built packages
#
> localrepo: {
>   url      : http://my-build-host/live_packages,
>   priority : 20,
>   enabled  : yes,
}

> And then you're good to go with "pkg upgrade -r localrepo" on each of
> the remote hosts.

> Cheers.

> Jonathan Chen

I think my main concern is getting packages into a synth-recognized repository.

I would use NFS rather than http.  I would need to be sure to disable freebsd.org server in the conf, think I just did, now need to check on the other computer.

I don't really want to have to rebuild synth and dependencies redundantly after all are installed on first build-host computer.

But I would want to use synth on either computer without depending on the other computer; what I am concerned with now is getting started.

Tom