Updating Information for FreeBSD ports developers
This file is maintained by Erwin Lansing <erwin@FreeBSD.org> and
copyrighted by the FreeBSD Foundation.
This file contains major changes to ports and the ports infrastructure.
Intended audience are ports committers, maintainers and other
developers. User oriented changes should be submitted for inclusion
in the release notes.
All ports committers are allowed to commit to this file.
20040204:
The bsd.php.mk file has been moved out of the lang/php4 port
into the Mk directory. This will make it much easier to include
PHP support in PHP-dependent ports. Instead of including
bsd.php.mk directly, a port can simply set USE_PHP=yes, and the
ports system with Do the Right Thing.
All trailing whitespace has been removed from bsd.port.mk.
Enhance the new OPTIONS code by only including saved options if
the port defines OPTIONS, attempt to use LATEST_LINK as the
unique name for a port (fall back to ${PKGNAMEPREFIX}${PORTNAME}
otherwise), bring the ===> messages in line with the existing
ones by using PKGNAME instead of PORTNAME, use PKGNAME in the
dialog, use ECHO_CMD instead of ECHO_MSG to write the
OPTIONSFILE, display a message during compilation indicating
that user-specified options have been found, and make the output
of the showconfig target a little more user-friendly.
A new USE_ICONV macro has been added that takes the place of an
explicit LIB_DEPENDS on converters/libiconv. This will help
with future shared lib version bumps.
A new USE_GETTEXT macro has been added that takes the place of
an explicit LIB_DEPENDS on devel/gettext. This will help with
future shared lib version bumps.
Module::Build is a system for building, testing, and installing
Perl modules. It will eventually replace the obsoleted
ExtUtils::MakeMaker. Many new Perl modules have already
switched to using Build.PL instead of Makefile.PL. To
facilitate building those modules, a new PERL_MODBUILD macro has
been added. Use that in place of PERL_CONFIGURE when porting
Perl modules that make use of the Module::Build framework.
Certain ports want to check for the availability of SDL
libraries before including them. This change adds a new
WANT_SDL macro similar to WANT_GNOME. By setting this, the
porter indicates that her port can optional use SDL if present
on the system. WANT_SDL should be defined _before_
bsd.port.pre.mk is included. After including bsd.port.pre.mk,
the list of available SDL components will be returned in the
HAVE_SDL macro. For details on how to process this component
list, refer to bsd.sdl.mk.
The OpenBSD and NetBSD projects diverged from the FreeBSD ports
tree years ago, and it no longer make sense to include obsolete
references to incorrect paths in the FreeBSD ports system. This
change removes the NetBSD and OpenBSD PORTSDIR compatibility
bits from bsd.port.mk.
The comment for PKGDIR read, ``A direction containing any
package creating file.'' The word ``direction'' should be
``directory.'' This has been fixed.
A new DIRNAME macro has been added that points to
/usr/bin/dirname. All direct use of dirname in ports can be
switched to this macro.
Direct use of commands dirname, id, and rm have been corrected
to use their macro equivalents instead. Some useless ${HEAD}
-n 1 statements have been removed. A strange comment in the
do-install target and an out of place ``fi'' have been fixed as
well.
On 5-CURRENT after the 5.2-RELEASE split, the default Perl
version has been updated from 5.6.1 to 5.8.2. As well, some
Perl definitions in bsd.port.mk have been moved to their correct
locations which corrects the PERL_LEVEL definition.
The following optimizations have been added to the ports system
to speed up recursive operations such as make describe, make
index, make ignorelist, etc. bsd.gnome.mk is now only included
if a port defines USE_GNOME, WANT_GNOME, and/or USE_GTK. More
variables are cached and passed down through bsd.port.subdir.mk.
Perl is no longer invoked when a simple ``echo'' will do. More
subshell variable assignments have been hidden behind
conditionals so that the commands are not spawned everytime.
Finally, dependency lists are only constructed if ports actually
declare dependencies. These optimizations give make index
approximately a 43% speedup.
If CPUFLAGS is not defined (this _CPUCFLAGS is empty), trying
to remove _CPUCFLAGS from CFLAGS will result in an error. This
change fixes that.
On recent versions of 5.X, /etc/rc.subr exists, and there is no
reason to install another copy in ${LOCALBASE}/etc. The reason
this was ever done was to workaround some build issues on bento.
However, testing OSVERSION seems to work in spite of those build
issues.
The ports system now supports MySQL 3.23, 4.0, 4.1, and 5.0.
Also, the ability to scale to newer versions was also but in
place.
An .endif comment indicated that the .if block checked
WANT_MYSQL when, in fact, it was checking WANT_MYSQL_VER. This
has been corrected.
The PTHREAD{CFLAGS,LIBS} macros have been made overridable on
all versions of FreeBSD to allow for alternate threading
implementations (e.g. -lc_r, -lthr, -mt, etc.). The default
threading library has been changed to -lpthread from -lc_r on
-CURRENT.
The new SIZE support broke distfiles fetching on FreeBSD < 4.8.
On those versions of FreeBSD, the SIZE distfile attribute is now
ignored. Also, defining DISABLE_SIZE in, for example,
/etc/make.conf, will ignore the SIZE attribute on all versions
of FreeBSD. This is useful with alternate values for FETCH_CMD.
A new vulnerabilities database has been added to the ports
system in order to keep more accurate, up-to-date, track of
security vulnerabilities. The ports system now knows how to
query that database and dynamically prevents the installation
of vulnerable ports.
In order to allow for more rapid development of the package
tools, the ports system will prefer to use pkg_* tools found in
${LOCALBASE} over those in the base system. However, all PKG_*
macros are still overridable.
A new physical category, net-mgmt, has been created to house
network management ports.
The /var/db/port.mkversion file never really took off, and is
now very obsolete. Replace the code used to generate and check
this file with a simple OSVERSION check. The ports system now
requires FreeBSD 4.3 or higher.
The last round of bsd.*.mk changes broke ports that had
duplicate distinfo entries (e.g. linux_base). This is now
fixed. Along with this fix, only distfiles with a bad checksum
will be refetched, where as distfiles missing from distinfo will
not be refetched.
The PLIST_{DIRS,FILES} macros were passed to the final package
list unchanged by PLIST_SUB. This is not always desirable.
Now, those macros are passed through PLIST_SUB.
The previous OPTIONS code assumed users would be running port
build as root. If this was not the case, OPTIONS configuration
would fail. Now, the bits of the config and rmconfig targets
that require write access to system directories are run under
SU_CMD.
The makesum target will now add a SIZE attribute for each
distfile by default. This can be overridden by defining NO_SIZE
in a port's Makefile. Note: this could probably be expanded to
omit SIZE attributes for specific distfiles in the future.
20040129:
SIZE lines in distinfo files: if you set USE_SIZE when you do "make
makesum", the byte sizes of the distfiles will be listed in the
distinfo file. Then, if a distfile is replaced on its master site with
one of a different size than that listed, "make fetch" will fail with a
"size mismatch" error before downloading the file and the user will be
asked to fetch the file by hand. Also, a user will know the size of
the distfiles before fetching and decide to fetch later.
20040129:
Start of CHANGES file.
FORMAT:
This file contains a list, in reverse chronological order, of major
breakages or added features in tracking ports. Not all things will be
listed here, and it only starts on January 29, 2004.
Copyright information:
Copyright 2004 FreeBSD Foundation All Rights Reserved.
Redistribution, publication, translation and use, with or without
modification, in full or in part, in any form or format of this
document are permitted without further permission from the author.
THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED BY FREEBSD FOUNDATION ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE
DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL WARNER LOSH BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT,
INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES
(INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR
SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION)
HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT,
STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING
IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
If you find this document useful, and you want to, you may buy the
author a beer.
Contact Erwin Lansing if you have any questions about your use of
this document.
$FreeBSD$
