Ports,

The bsd community maintains a huge collection of reviewed and stable sources for open source software. The ports collection contains a framework of Makefiles and descriptions containing enough information to build the port from source. Using the ports collection on a bsd box is as simple as changing to the port's working directory and typing make &&make install.

The ports collection can be retrieved in one of two ways. You can get the port collection in its entirety at ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/ports-current/ports.tar.gz or you can pull the individual port from the cvs tree. http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/$category/$port/$port.tar.gz?tarball=1

The structure of the ports tree is:

• /usr/ports/<category>/<package>

The port's directory itself contains the following

• Makefile
  -- Contains most of the information required to build the package. Key variables include.
  • PORTNAME
  • PORTVERSION
  • PORTREVISION
  • CATEGORIES
  • PKGNAMEPREFIX
  • DISTFILES
  • BUILD_DEPENDS
  • RUN_DEPENDS
  • CONFIGURE_ARGS
  • CONFIGURE_ENV
  • MAKE_ARGS
  • MAKE_ENV
• pkg-plist
  -- This file contains a manifest of the files to be installed. It includes directory information and weather or not the directory should be cleared out or not.
• pkg-descr
  -- This file contains the package description
• distinfo
  -- contains the filenames, sizes and checksums for the source
• files/
  contains any file not in the distribution and patches needed to build the file on xxxBSD
  • patch-xx

Packages

PackageMaker