automating menu options in ports (and other ports build questions)
Gary Aitken
freebsd at dreamchaser.org
Fri May 25 01:29:04 UTC 2012
1. When building a port, the system uses sysinstall to set options for
the build. How does one configure those options so make can be run
unattended? I didn't see anything in the ports documentation, but maybe
I'm blind. In particular, how does one configure a dependent port for
the options you want whenever it is built as part of a higher-level build?
2. Do port builds deal with concurrency?
i.e. can I safely do a make install in two different ports subtrees
simultaneously?
I attempted this with gnome2-lite and firefox and ended up with the
firefox build barfing on tests in shared-mime-info -- one of the tests
failed because a directory already existed. I had to deinstall and
reinstall shared-mime-info and then restart the firefox make. The two
builds actually ended up in the less likely scenario of trying to build
the same dependency at roughly the same time.
3. Do the package builds use the defaults set in the ports tree? If
not, how are the options for packages chosen, and how does one determine
what the package options are?
4. Is there a discussion anywhere of whether or not one should turn on
various optimizations? If these aren't turned on by default, but are
safe, why aren't they the default? Is this a cross-platform build
issue, and the default is to build for cross-platform?
5. It looks like the options which show up using sysinstall are from the
OPTIONS variable in the Makefile. Is there any convention for where to
find out more about the option other than the often useless text hint
provided in the menu?
e.g. gvfs has an option called
FUSE Enable fuse
which doesn't say which of the several software systems called FUSE this
refers to
e.g. OPENGL Use OpenGL graphics
doesn't say much about why you would want to do that,
what the opengl option actually does, ramifications,
whether it will help only if your graphics card / driver supports it,
etc.
Or is this a documentation project in the offing?
Thanks,
Gary
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