From owner-freebsd-ports Sun Oct 29 18:56:41 1995 Return-Path: owner-ports Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id SAA25853 for ports-outgoing; Sun, 29 Oct 1995 18:56:41 -0800 Received: from time.cdrom.com (time.cdrom.com [192.216.222.226]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id SAA25846 for ; Sun, 29 Oct 1995 18:56:38 -0800 Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by time.cdrom.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) with SMTP id SAA10060 for ; Sun, 29 Oct 1995 18:56:20 -0800 Prev-Resent: Sun, 29 Oct 1995 18:56:20 -0800 Prev-Resent: "ports@freefall " Received: from freefall.freebsd.org (freefall.cdrom.com [192.216.222.4]) by time.cdrom.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) with ESMTP id MAA08860 for ; Sun, 29 Oct 1995 12:34:46 -0800 Received: from localhost (daemon@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with SMTP id MAA16589 ; Sun, 29 Oct 1995 12:34:39 -0800 Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id MAA16567 for current-outgoing; Sun, 29 Oct 1995 12:34:31 -0800 Received: from ast.com (irvine.ast.com [165.164.128.2]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with SMTP id MAA16557 for ; Sun, 29 Oct 1995 12:34:24 -0800 Received: from fw.ast.com by ast.com with SMTP id AA09619 (5.67b/IDA-1.5 for ); Sun, 29 Oct 1995 12:35:29 -0800 Received: from nemesis by fw.ast.com with uucp (Smail3.1.29.1 #4) id m0t9e73-00008FC; Sun, 29 Oct 95 14:13 CST Received: by nemesis.lonestar.org (Smail3.1.27.1 #19) id m0t9e4S-000ItnC; Sun, 29 Oct 95 14:11 WET Message-Id: Date: Sun, 29 Oct 95 14:11 WET To: current@freebsd.org From: uhclem%nemesis@fw.ast.com (Frank Durda IV) Sent: Sun Oct 29 1995, 14:11:07 CST Subject: Ports - What is the standard for "ported"? Resent-To: ports@freefall.FreeBSD.org Resent-Date: Sun, 29 Oct 1995 18:56:20 -0800 Resent-Message-ID: <10058.815021780@time.cdrom.com> Resent-From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Sender: owner-ports@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk I recently (and am still) going through a rather agonizing migration of a SCO UNIX system to FreeBSD 2.0.5. Apart from lots of issues with SCSI hardware that SCO took in stride and FreeBSD hated ("unknown board" errors for an Adaptec 1540A, which is one of the non-thru-hole, 2nd generation surface-mount boards, and dealing with a WangDAT tape drive that under 2.0.5 won't let you remove the media until you reboot the system, OR you can issue a mt offline, remove the media, and then reboot to get the drive to load new media - that really stinks and didn't happen under SCO and I hope it is fixed in 2.1.0), I ran into a lot of application issues. My big problem came with some of the ports. I really haven't had the opportunity to use or rely on these or the associated mechanisms before, but in the past 72 hours I have and found them to be a tad "uneven". The worst offender was smail. I had to manually locate the files since the site was not operating under its final IP address yet (so that the neighbors would not try to send mail yet), and the pkg system tried to get the package first from ftp.uu.net, which refuses all requests from sites with no reverse DNS look-up. Nice deadly embrace. 99% of the desktops where I work would fail in the same way because the security guys won't list them in the DNS tables that are visible outside the firewall. Make then went on to Walnut Creek, and failed with an error that looked like it was unable to find the files on that system. If it was supposed to try additional locations at this point, that doesn't work. Later I discovered that WC was "full" at the time, and the code that performs the downloads doesn't put out a real good message describing what is really going on. So now I have smail down and I do the "make". BOOM! Oh, you have to have bash installed (a different port) before you can build smail. This "other package first" requirement was not listed anywhere I noted, and it seems curious that we would include a port installation that relied on a shell that we don't distribute by default. Ok, I got bash and installed it. Re-ran the smail install, and it decided it had better download everything again. (Why?). Then it started building, WITHOUT giving me a chance to update the EDITME file. Ok, I assume EDITME must be set-up perfectly for FreeBSD. (Foolish) The compile goes with numerous warnings, and finally succeeds. So I install. I send a test message to myself. It is not delivered. Run the queue manually. It is not delivered. The mail is in the queue, but smail complains about having to defer delivery. I update the config file to indicate a local "smart" mailer and try off-site mail. That works fine! I try sending mail from a remote system to my account. It is placed in the queue and eventually delivered. I try local mail again from me to me (or from root to root). Local mail just sits in the queue endlessly. After a few days of investigation, it appears that the "os/freebsd2.0" file for smail and the patches for FreeBSD for smail are not quite compatible, with the result you have to comment-out all of the local: stuff in transports if you ever want to see mail from yourself or any other local account again. The EDITME and os items seem to be out of date on system capabilities as well, turning on features FreeBSD doesn't have and not turning on some that it has now. Maybe these files were correct at FreeBSD 2.0, but they are not correct now. So I went to make changes to conf/EDITME, and cd .. and then did a "make clean" "make". Guess what? It fails because of some "bashisms", even if I run "bash" before doing the makes. The only way I could get it to compile at this point was to cd ../.., remove the .build_complete (or whatever it was called) file, cd .. again and then do a make up here. You have to be careful because once it decided the best thing to do was re-extract the entire distribution and erase the changes I just made. Grrr. Oh, and don't do the "make clean" at this higher level, because it WILL erase the EDITME file, and re-extracts everything from the distribution tar. That isn't my idea of a "make clean" action. Again, I found no README that mentioned that you have to anything out of the ordinary to make and/or configure smail. The EDITME also dictated some locations for directories and files that did not match where they already are on a FreeBSD, particularly if you are planning on completely replacing sendmail with smail. Where it looks for spool, aliases and paths spring to mind. This makes me wonder: is the requirement for a "port" that it just compiles and links? Someone needs to look at smail and see if things need updating. Also, if a port requires some other non-included item (like BASH), it should state this somewhere, like in a README. I can see where this stuff would drive a newbie totally nuts. Frank Durda IV |"The Knights who say "LETNi" or uhclem%nemesis@fw.ast.com (Fastest Route)| demand... A SEGMENT REGISTER!!!" ...letni!rwsys!nemesis!uhclem |"A what?" ...decvax!fw.ast.com!nemesis!uhclem |"LETNi! LETNi! LETNi!" - 1983