• KubilayKocakPorts
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FreeBSD Ports: New Contributors 101

First up, thank you for deciding to dedicate your time and effort to the FreeBSD community and to make things better.

This guide is designed to be lightweight, get you ramped up quickly, and save you time and effort. Is it not exhaustive.

Get Ready

• Create a dedicated Email address. But expect spam (Gmail is good).

• Create a FreeBSD Bugzilla account.

  • Set your Full Name (for credit in commit logs).

• Set DEVELOPER=yes in /etc/make.conf (turns on lots of QA/error/sanity checks).

Get The Tools

At a minimum:

• Porttools ports-mgmt/porttools (installs portlint)

• Portlint ports-mgmt/portlint

• Poudriere ports-mgmt/poudriere

For bonus points:

• GitLab, Bitbucket or GitHub account for managing a ports tree

• Mercurial or Git

Your Resources

• FreeBSD Porters Handbook

• FreeBSD Issue Tracker

• FreeBSD Portscout

• FreshPorts

• FreeBSD Ports Monitor (portsmon)

Your Support Network

• EFNet IRC: #bsdports, #freebsd-bugbusters
• Freenode IRC: #freebsd-ports, #freebsd (You'll need to register your nickname: /ns help register)

• Twitter: [@FreeBSDHelp](https://twitter.com/FreeBSDHelp)

The Basic Process

Create a place where you'll keep your local ports, ~username/ports is fine.

Setup your ~username/.porttools configuration (read porttools(5)).

1. Copy the category/port you want to modify from /usr/ports into your local tree
2. Make your changes
3. Test your changes (portlint, poudriere, unit tests, etc)
4. Submit your changes

Here it is in action

   1 cp -Rp /usr/ports/category/portname ~username/ports/category
   2 <make some changes>
   3 port test
   4 <fix reported issues>
   5 port test
   6 port diff
   7 `
   8 Looks good!
   9 
  10 `
  11 port diff > patch.diff

Create new Bugzilla issue.

Attach patch.diff to issue.

Protips and Magic Incantations

The following work in port directories (ie: category/port)

• make makesum When you change what files a port downloads (updates distinfo file)

• make makepatch Automatically creates patches in files/ using filename/filename.orig pairs)

• make -V VARIABLE Check the value of a make VARIABLE

CategoryHowTo CategoryPorts

Based on FreeBSD Ports: New Contributors 101 by KubilayKocak