using/getting ports

walt wa1ter at myrealbox.com
Sun Jul 31 12:21:05 PDT 2005


Huub wrote:
Hi,

If I want to get the ports, should I get the ports.tar.gz from FreeBSD 4.x?
Yes.  There are some problems to be aware of when building ports from
sources -- both FBSD ports and NBSD pkgsrc are affected equally.
First, the compiler has been customized for DragonFly, not for
FreeBSD.  Source code that has things like #ifdef __FreeBSD__
will not work correctly even if it finishes compiling.
Second, there are some kernel data structures which have been
modified from FreeBSD so that programs which monitor things
like CPU load, memory usage, swap space, etc will not compile.
Our fearless team is busy fixing these problems but they still
have a long way to go before all ports will build on DFly.
If you know some basic programming you can probably fix these
problems on your own.  (Even I can fix a lot of them.)
Meanwhile, there are many pre-compiled binary packages which
you can download if you prefer.




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