Sharing ports hierarchy via NFS to different arch/versions.

[Mel]

On Saturday 24 January 2009 09:32:54 Doug Poland wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I've got a network running different versions of FreeBSD (6.3, 7.0) on
> different architectures (i386, SPARC64).
>
> What I'd like to do is export the ports hierarchy to all machines, but
> preserving ports/packages for each version/architecture.  I also want
> to make rebuilding indexes run as fast as possible.
>
> Right now, I simply exports(5) /usr/ports via NFSv3.  The problem
> comes in with INDEX files and packages.  Indexes get updated only when
> the host serving the export updates the hierarchy via portsnap update.
>  If I create a package on SPARC64 and the package exists already for
> an i386 build, then I've got an issue.
>
> Can someone point me to a doc/google/man page that may give me some
> guidance in setting up such an environment?

The following 2 lines on each machine in /etc/make.conf should fix those 
problems:
PACKAGES=${PORTSDIR}/packages/${ARCH}
INDEXFILE=INDEX-${ARCH}-${OSVERSION:C/([0-9]).*/\1/}

Packages will end up in /usr/ports/packages/sparc64 on sparc64 machines 
and /usr/ports/packages/i386 on i386 machines etc.
Indexfiles will be named according to arch as well.

Adjust PKG_PATH in your environment if you use pkg_add(1) accordingly.

-- 
Mel

Problem with today's modular software: they start with the modules
    and never get to the software part.