Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:21:25 -0400 From: Michael Powell <nightrecon@hotmail.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: firefox install problem Message-ID: <i3s1pk$24l$1@dough.gmane.org> References: <4C60C4D9.A6BEE6E@blakemfg.com> <4C60D596.8070405@too1337.com> <4C617BA6.659B26B4@blakemfg.com>
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Fred Boatwright wrote: > Hello Steve, > > I have not had any luck installing the package manually. The file is a > tar.gz which pkg_add apparently can't handle. I did download > firefox.tar.gz and unpacked it. Pkg_info says it is corrupt. Changes > were apparently made to this package about two weeks ago and possibly > something didn't happen correctly. Should this be reported to a > different mail list or should a bug report be made? Or am I mistaken? A tar.gz is a source code tarball meant to be compiled via the ports system. pkg_add installs precompiled and packaged binary packages. Package files will have a .tbz extension. pkg_add does not operate on source code tarballs. > If a package needed to be installed manually, how would pkg_add know to > get all the dependencies remotely? Firefox has a huge list of > dependencies which would be very difficult to deal with manually. The dependency tracking is handled by the ports system, whether you are compiling with make && make install or installing prebuilt packages. A prebuilt package is just the finished product from the ports build system which someone has already run. In order to keep everything up to date, the ports tree needs to be updated and kept current. Installing from the CD/DVD is all well and good, but the ports tree is already stale at this point. Many long-time FreeBSD'ers only install the OS and the ports tree from a CD/DVD. They then immediately update the ports tree before proceeding to install software. Many dependency related problems are traceable right back to an out of date ports tree. More info on this subject is available in the Handbook. > Best regards, > > Fred > > Steven Susbauer wrote: >> >> On 08/09/10 22:17, Fred Boatwright wrote: >> > Hello, >> > >> > I have installed FreeBSD-8.0 from the CD and have it running ok. I >> > have installed several packages including thunderbird using pkg_add -r >> > package_name. When I try to install firefox I get a file unavailable >> > error. The web site shows firefox-3.6.8,1 is available (i386). What >> > can I do to install firefox? >> > >> >> You can manually download the package from a mirror and then install it >> with pkg_add (pkg_add firefox-3.6.8,1.tbz). >> _______________________________________________ Notice the .tbz here. -Mike
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