FreeBSD Cert

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 30 May 2020 23:03:59 +0000, Brandon helsley wrote:
>So to find out the legality of licensing to port a program to freebsd
>do all I have to do is contact that programs website. And then source
>code is quite easy to obtain I see. It would just be on git hub right.

Not necessarily on Microsoft's hosting service GitHub. There are
SourceForge, GitLab a zillion other and some developers simply use
their own homepage to provide the source code.

>For the executable script and profiles and config files l, I guessing
>the porters handbook is how you fashion those in working order?

I don't know if the hanbook mentions the following, too. Often it's
wiser to get in touch with upstream, to ask them to fix an issue, than
to fix an issue by a FreeBSD port (or any other operating system's
repository).

Often just reporting a bug correctly is the best thing to do. Go to the
issue tracker and describe an issue. What happens? What should happen
instead? Post the output you get by a terminal, strace, gdb a log
file... Describe the steps to reproduce the issue.

The developer probably will reply and give you pointers in helping
troubleshooting. So you will learn a lot you might need the day you
become a port maintainer. Maybe before maintaining a port, you will use
your skills to help maintaining Wikis, so you would help FLOSS
communities and get more skills yourself.

Now that you know the procedures, it makes more sense to read the
FreeBSD handbooks and Wikis that are not necessarily related to
FreeBSD only, on how to do things, such as maintaining a port, debugging
or even how to do interleaved posting when replying to a mailing list
thread. etc. and after that, if still necessary, to ask for help on a
mailing list.