[Midnightbsd-mports] Weekly Report for 4/9-4/16

Chris Reinhardt ctriv at midnightbsd.org
Fri May 16 23:06:10 EDT 2008


Hi to all in mports land.

The Week

Not a lot of big changes, laffer moved the tk/tcl categories to be
version agnostic, this caused a few regressions that he and crash have
mostly cleaned up.  Crash is continuing his excellent work on updating
and tagging licenses on various ports.  I was busy with family
obligations most of the week, though work continues on my port of
openjdk6 and on libmport.


Open Issues


Package Name Uniqueness

With libmport coming pretty soon, the push to make every package name
unique continues.  Under the old rules, two packages with the same
name could be installed, as long as they didn't have the same package
origin (a package origin is the port that made the package).  libmport
requires that every installed package have a unique name (name, not
"name-version".  Run make -VPKGBASE in a port to see it's package
name).

Here is a list of package names that are not unique:
http://www.midnightbsd.org/wiki/LibMport


Documentation

There is a growing need for better documentation on the mports system.
 Right now most of the documentation is the comments and the beginning
of bsd.mport.mk.  Apart from that, there is the FreeBSD porter's
manual (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/porters-handbook/), but
there is no version modified to reflect the changes we've made.  As
our ports tree continues to diverge from FreeBSD, this issue will
grow.

No firm decisions had been made yet.  However, a set of manpages is
likely; while a mports maintainer's handbook may be coming in the
future.


Coming Soon

Metaports

Meta ports (ports which have no contents of their own - they are just
a list of depends) will be changing radically soon.  They will soon
use a CONTENTS variable to list the ports that belong to the meta
port.  The makefile would look something like:

  PORTNAME= foo
  PORTVERSION= 1
  CATEGORIES=  meta foo

  CONTENTS= devel/foo-utils lang/foo-compiler net/foo-rpc

These ports would be able to make mport bundle files that contain all
the packages in CONTENTS.

Stay tuned for more.


Extension Changes

The extensions (bsd.perl.mk or bsd.java.mk) add domain specific
features to mports as needed.  We may move to generic loading system
for these extensions soon.  For example currently the perl extension
can be loaded by defining any of these variables: USE_PERL5,
PERL_CONFIGURE, PERL_MODBUILD, USE_PERL5_RUN, USE_PERL5_BUILD.  The
exact mechanism hasn't been decided on yet, but it will probably be
something like USE_BAR=yes loads /usr/mports/Mk/ext/bar.mk.

Stay tuned.



That's about all the news for now.  Happy hacking.

ctriv

-- 
Chris Reinhardt - ctriv at MidnightBSD.org


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