How should a non-port maintainer submit a binary package for a port?

[Matthew Seaman]

Adam Nealis wrote:

> Having just taken the plunge and updated my world to 6.0-STABLE on one of
> my boxen, I'm going through the process of installing gnome2 et al. I've
> used 
> 
> portinstall -Pp
> 
> so as to end up with packages for everything I install so that I can more
> quickly update my other box from 5.4-RELEASE to 6.0-STABLE + packages.
> 
> Since I'll soon have used up a lot of time building binary packages, it
> occurred to me that it might be useful to submit these packages to the
> official repositories.
> 
> But the question is "How?".
> 
> Do I have to contact the port maintainer?
> 
> Would the maintainer trust me?

Thank you for the offer, but I'm afraid you're on a hiding to nothing
here.

Individual port maintainers have almost no control over whether and
when binary packages are created from the ports they maintain -- other
than the basic "License Terms forbid redistribution in Binary Form"
sort of thing.  Control of what does go onto the FreeBSD FTP servers
rests with the 'portmgr' team:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributors/staff-listing.html

But don't try e-mailing them directly as they are incredibly busy
people: use the freebsd-ports at freebsd.org mailing list instead for
ports related discussions.

The FreeBSD project has quite a number of package building machines
spread around the world.  Those are the only machines trusted to generate
the packages available on the FreeBSD web/FTP servers.  Permitting just
anybody to submit precompiled packages would be a security nightmare:
how would you ensure that the compiled code hadn't been built from
trojanned sources?

As complete a set of packages as possible is built just prior to each
release.  Packages are also built regularly for the main development
branches. Updated packages are built where ports get updated between
the main package building runs although the time lag on that can be
several weeks.  Packages are built for all tier-1 architectures and
for the latest releases from supported branches (currently 5.4 & 6.0)
as well as the active development branches (4-STABLE, 5-STABLE, 6-STABLE
and HEAD (a.k.a 7-CURRENT)) -- the FTP servers currently say this:

250-These are packages for the i386 architecture.  Here are brief
250-descriptions of each subdirectory.
250-
250-  packages-4-stable:      Packages for FreeBSD-4-stable.
250-  packages-4.11-release:  Packages for FreeBSD 4.11-release.
250-  packages-5-stable:      Packages for FreeBSD-5-stable.
250-  packages-5.4-release:   Packages for FreeBSD 5.4-release.
250-  packages-6-current:     Packages for FreeBSD-6-current.
250-  packages-7-current:     Packages for FreeBSD-7-current.
250-
250-packages-*-release directories are built from the ports collection
250-shipped with the release, and are not updated thereafter.

but that's a little out of date as it's packages-6.0-release and 
packages-6-stable nowadays and there isn't a packages-4.11-release
directory any more.   There's a detailed description of the build
procedures here:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/portbuild/index.html

and a big database of results of running all those builds here:

http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/

	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                       7 Priory Courtyard
                                                      Flat 3
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey         Ramsgate
                                                      Kent, CT11 9PW
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