Package Building Procedures

The FreeBSD Ports Management Team

$FreeBSD: doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/portbuild/article.sgml,v 1.51 2010/01/26 03:24:58 linimon Exp $

Table of Contents
1 Introduction and Conventions
2 Build Client Management
3 Chroot Build Environment Setup
4 Starting the Build
5 Anatomy of a Build
6 Interrupting a Build
7 Monitoring the Build
8 Dealing With Build Errors
9 Release Builds
10 Uploading Packages
11 Experimental Patches Builds
12 How to configure a new package building node
13 How to configure a new FreeBSD branch
14 How to configure a new architecture
15 Procedures for dealing with disk failures

1 Introduction and Conventions

In order to provide pre-compiled binaries of third-party applications for FreeBSD, the Ports Collection is regularly built on one of the “Package Building Clusters.” Currently, the main cluster in use is at http://pointyhat.FreeBSD.org.

Most of the package building magic occurs under the /var/portbuild directory. Unless otherwise specified, all paths will be relative to this location. ${arch} will be used to specify one of the package architectures (amd64, i386™, ia64, powerpc, and Sparc64®), and ${branch} will be used to specify the build branch (6, 7, 7-exp, 8, 8-exp, 9, 9-exp).

Note: Packages are no longer built for Release 4 or 5, nor for the alpha architecture.

The scripts that control all of this live in /var/portbuild/scripts/. These are the checked-out copies from /usr/ports/Tools/portbuild/scripts/.

Typically, incremental builds are done that use previous packages as dependendencies; this takes less time, and puts less load on the mirrors. Full builds are usually only done:

right after release time, for the -STABLE branches
periodically to test changes to -CURRENT
for experimental builds

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		Build Client Management