When is a FreeBSD port not a port?

[Mel Pilgrim]

On 10/28/2017 21:16, Shane Ambler wrote:
> On 27/10/2017 22:46, Matthew Seaman wrote:
>> On 27/10/2017 12:13, Frank Leonhardt wrote:
>>> I've written a "few" utilities over the years that I've made available
>>> in various places, but it might make sense to put them in
>>> ports/sysutils. However, they were written on BSD and are therefore not
>>> ports.
>>>
>>> Should I submit them anyway (if I find time to clean them up, of
>>> course)? Or if not, any (polite) suggestions as to where I should put
>>> them? I don't use GitHub or SourceForge (too old to change my ways, and
>>> I normally work off-line anyway).
>>>
>>> e.g. http://www.fjl.co.uk/free-stuff
>>>
>>
>> By all means, please do submit your FreeBSD specific code as a "port".
>> There's precedent -- various ports for periodic jobs or other
>> FreeBSD-ish things.  We aren't hung up on the precise meaning of "ports"
>> -- it's really a collection of software handily prepared to compile
>> easily and (increasingly so over time) be made available as pre-compiled
>> binary packages.
> 
> The ports and packages system installs and manages software that is not
> provided by the base system. It is really about simplifying the process
> of downloading, building and installing available software.
> 
> The name may have originated based on the idea of "porting" software to
> run on freebsd but it has grown to be more than that now. You may notice
> that a lot of software in the ports tree does not need patches to run on
> freebsd, so many ports are not "ported" to freebsd, just installed.

Alternately, if you feel this is a tool only you would use, but still 
want to use the Ports Tree, pkg, poudriere, etc. to manage or deploy the 
tool, you can locally extend the ports tree.