The Ports collection / FreeBSD CDs

[RW]

On Tuesday 12 September 2006 21:02, ograbme wrote:

> I had mounted the ports CD I have and located sudo-1.6.8p12.tar.gz in
> the distfiles directory.  I copied it over into the /usr/ports/sudo
> directory, gunzipped it, and then untarred it.
>
> I then made sure I was in the directory containing sudo.c and all its
> attendent other files and tried the above "make install clean".
> Unfortunately it was a no-go.  Resultant message I received was:
>
>  "make: Don't know how to make install.  Stop"
>
> Obviously I've done something wrong here ... misstepped or tried to do
> the impossible, huh? LOL! Perhaps,

The ports collection is a set of recipes that enable the the ports system to 
automatically fetch the source, extract it, patch it, build and install the 
result. You can do all this manually, but it's often not straightforward. And 
the added advantage is that software that's installed through the ports 
system is also registered in the package database- making it easier to 
deinstall and upgrade.  

Before you can build from ports, you need to have ports tree in place, the 
standard way to do this is by running portsnap.