From owner-freebsd-doc Sun Jun 23 11:09:27 1996 Return-Path: owner-doc Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id LAA11888 for doc-outgoing; Sun, 23 Jun 1996 11:09:27 -0700 (PDT) Received: from jraynard.demon.co.uk (jraynard.demon.co.uk [158.152.42.77]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id LAA11876 for ; Sun, 23 Jun 1996 11:09:12 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from fdocs@localhost) by jraynard.demon.co.uk (8.6.12/8.6.12) id PAA01610; Sun, 23 Jun 1996 15:08:11 GMT Date: Sun, 23 Jun 1996 15:08:11 +0000 () From: James Raynard To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" cc: Annelise Anderson , freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Revised ports entry for handbook In-Reply-To: <2569.835512196@time.cdrom.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-doc@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk 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