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Date:      Sun, 23 Jun 1996 15:08:11 +0000 ()
From:      James Raynard <fdocs@jraynard.demon.co.uk>
To:        "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Cc:        Annelise Anderson <ANDRSN@HOOVER.STANFORD.EDU>, freebsd-doc@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Revised ports entry for handbook
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.3.91.960623145854.1576C-100000@jraynard.demon.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <2569.835512196@time.cdrom.com>

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On Sat, 22 Jun 1996, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:

> > Interesting, there's no evidence in my packages database for any port
> > I've ever done, except for those done using lndir.
> 
> He means the database in /var/db/pkg - the pkg_add command updates
> this area.

Oh right, I've never actually installed any packages so I didn't realise 
there was a potential ambiguity.

> >    >with the XFree86 distribution. Find a location with some free space
> >    >and create a directory there, and make a symbolic link from /usr/ports
> > 
> > This symbolic link has no purpose unless one has two /usr partitions?
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean here.  Also, I haven't read this whole
> document through so far or I'd have flagged this one as also
> potentially unnecessary if the user has answered yes to the "do you
> want to link the ports collection to your CDROM?" question during the
> installation.  That should be noted someplace.

It will be! 8-)

> > It seems to me the lndir approach to ports is so obviously superior to
> > a symbolic link to the distfiles on the cdrom or not using a symbolic
> > link or lndir that it's worth explaining, and worth explaining how to

To be honest, I just cut that out of the original document - I've never 
done it myself and I don't have X at the moment to try it out 8-(

> > >for i in *; do echo -n $i": "; cat $i/pkg/COMMENT; done
> > 
> > One could substitute DESCR for COMMENT in the above and get a more
> > complete description?  Could one send this to a file?  (And where should
> > the make describe command be invoked?)
> 
> Yeah, one could also do this - I really wouldn't try to override the
> functionality of describe here though (either in practice or on the
> document) since it's not really meant to do what James probably
> thought it did.  Make describe is only meant to be used to create the
> INDEX file which should then be used as fodder for more advanced
> queries.  Since there are all sorts of things one might wish to pull
> from a port to "describe" it, the index file facilitates finding the
> base directory, naming the ports DESCR file, and so on.

I see. I wondered why it had such a hard-to-read format 8-)

James Raynard, Edinburgh, Scotland
james@jraynard.demon.co.uk




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