Ports via svn, make fetchindex and make compatibility with NetBSD

[Matthew Seaman]

On 12/03/13 12:41, Thomas Mueller wrote:
> Is it necessary to make fetchindex after downloading or updating the ports tree using svn?
> 
> I have new installations of head and 10-stable where I so far can't connect to the Internet, though I can from Linux and NetBSD-current amd64.
> 
> So I use subversion, built on NetBSD from pkgsrc, to checkout and update ports tree as well as system source tree.
> 
> But I believe I can't run "make fetchindex" without Internet connection.
> 
> Now I read that FreeBSD make has switched to bmake in the 10-stable and head branches.
> 
> So could I run "make fetchindex" from NetBSD even if I don't attempt to actually build ports from NetBSD?
> 
> I would have to point the MAKECONF to FreeBSD's /etc/make.conf rather than use NetBSD's /etc/mk.conf which is specific to NetBSD.
> 
> Or is it safe to skip "make fetchindex" entirely?

For most purposes you don't really need a copy of the INDEX.  Some
software -- including portmaster(8), portupgrade(8) -- uses the INDEX
for various purposes, but even then I'm not sure if the presence of the
INDEX is mandatory for those.

If you do need a copy of the index, then you have two choices

   * build your own.  'make index' will thrash your machine for upwards
of twenty minutes, but doesn't require any sort of network access.
(There's also ports-mgmt/p5-FreeBSD-Portindex, but I'm biased because I
wrote it...)

   * Pull down the index from ne of the FreeBSD mirror sites.  'make
fetchindex' is just a wrapper around the command:

      fetch -o INDEX-10.bz2 http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/INDEX-10.bz2

(or INDEX-11.bz2 for HEAD).  You can use fetch(1), wget(1), curl(1) or
many other applications capable of pulling down a file from a webserver.
 Any Unixoid OS will have the capability to do this.

Building ports on NetBSD is a whole other kettle of fish.  It's not
going to work without a lot of effort to add compatibility changes.
(Getting the ports working on DFly which is much more closely related to
FBSD has been a fairly recent achievement, and that took quite a lot of
local patches.)

	Cheers,

	Matthew





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