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Date: Fri, 12 Sep 1997 09:08:48 +0930
From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To: "K.J.Koster" <kjk1@ukc.ac.uk>
Cc: FreeBSD Questions <questions@FreeBSD.org>, ports@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: Suggestion for ports...
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In-Reply-To: <Pine.SV4.3.95.970911205849.22246B-100000@kestrel.ukc.ac.uk>; from K.J.Koster on Thu, Sep 11, 1997 at 09:06:16PM +0100
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On Thu, Sep 11, 1997 at 09:06:16PM +0100, K.J.Koster wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> I just did my first installation from the `ports' (yes, a british ispell),
> and it was too easy. I had gone through all the trouble to download
> ispell, and make completely ignored me and took it straight from the cdrom
> (how rude :)

That'll teach you :-)  In fact, you never need to download.  Make will
do it for you if its needed.

> In one word: Wow!

It's impressive, isn't it?

> I do have a small suggestion (I haven't tried this, so it may already
> exist). I noticed that make uses a `work' directory to compile in. How
> about making it so that if make finds the file system read-only and is
> unable to create a work directory, it defaults to (for example)
> `/tmp/<portname>.work'. That way, the casual ports user can do
>
>   <place live filesys in cdrom drive>
>   mount /cdrom
>   cd /cdrom/ports/textproc/ispell
>   make british install
>    ...
>   cd
>   umount /cdrom
>
> No need to place a rather chunky ports distribution on your system. Does
> the ports collection already do this?

Not to my knowledge.  I'm copying FreeBSD-ports on this for other
opinions, but personally I don't think that's too important.  When
you're done, you can always do a 'make clean' to get rid of the stuff
you don't need.

Greg