Is this Ok

[Danny MacMillan]

On Wed, 28 Apr 2004 01:29:05 +0000, <putnam at speakeasy.net> wrote:

> I am not sure what to make out of the info scrolling on my screen. I 
> installed bsd and wanted to install all the ports to sort through them 
> latter and remove any once I got a look at them, so from root I typed
>
> cd /usr/ports
> make install
>
> just as it said to in the handbook sent with the cdroms it was on sunday 
> evening, for the past two days I have been reading
>
> building Makefile.dep
> Infile Included from Comp_Range/qsmodel.C:38:
> Comp_Range/qsmodel.h:96;7:warning no new line at end of file
> gmake[1]:Leaving directory`/user/ports/archivers/dact/work/dact-0.8.11'
> gmake[1]:Entering directory`/user/ports/archivers/dact/work/dacr-0.8.11'
>
> any info would be helpfull. Thanx

You have issued a command which will build every port in the system.  Even 
on an extremely fast computer with lots of resources, this is going to 
take a long, long time.  I would not be surprised if it took weeks or 
months to complete.  It is not advisable to do this anyway, as some ports 
are mutually incompatible.  I'm not sure which part of the handbook you're 
referring to, but it probably meant that you should install them one at a 
time, not all at once.

I would advise that you install portsman.  It allows you to browse the 
ports tree, read port descriptions and so on using an easy-to-navigate 
interface.  Once you find a port you're interested in installing, you can 
install it right from within portsman.  As root:

cd /usr/ports/sysutils/portsman
make install clean

Then:

portsman

It may give you a warning about an out-of-date index file.  If so, you can 
synchronize, make index, or ignore.  You can ignore and it won't be a huge 
deal -- some information might be missing or out-of-date but not so much 
that you won't know what you're looking at.  Make index takes quite a 
while to run (the warning says "up to 30 minutes") but is, as I understand 
it, the only way to make sure your index is 100% up to date with your 
ports tree.  For some reason, portsman ALWAYS asks me to make index -- 
even if I just did the make index.  So I usually end up ignoring.

Once you're in portsman the interface is pretty intuitive.  Up and down 
arrow moves the cursor up and down.  Right arrow moves deeper into the 
tree, left arrow moves closer to the root of the tree.  If you right-arrow 
on a particular port, you see the description.  Press q to quit.  Press h 
for help.

Portsman does not give you information you couldn't get by cd-ing around 
the tree and cat-ing files, running make pretty-print-build-depends and 
such ... but if browsing the tree to discover interesting ports is your 
goal (and it would seem that it is) it is much faster and more convenient 
to use portsman.

You should note that some ports are huge and will take a long time to 
build.  KDE, for example, seems to take about 16 hours on my AMD Athlon 
800MHz machine.  You may wish to install these as packages instead of 
building them from source.

-Dan