Chapter 14 Keeping Up

Table of Contents
14.1 FreshPorts
14.2 The Web Interface to the Source Repository
14.3 The FreeBSD Ports Mailing List
14.4 The FreeBSD Port Building Cluster on pointyhat.FreeBSD.org
14.5 The FreeBSD Ports Distfile Scanner
14.6 The FreeBSD Ports Monitoring System

The FreeBSD Ports Collection is constantly changing. Here is some information on how to keep up.

14.1 FreshPorts

One of the easiest ways to learn about updates that have already been committed is by subscribing to FreshPorts. You can select multiple ports to monitor. Maintainers are strongly encouraged to subscribe, because they will receive notification of not only their own changes, but also any changes that any other FreeBSD committer has made. (These are often necessary to keep up with changes in the underlying ports framework--although it would be most polite to receive an advance heads-up from those committing such changes, sometimes this is overlooked or just simply impractical. Also, in some cases, the changes are very minor in nature. We expect everyone to use their best judgement in these cases.)

If you wish to use FreshPorts, all you need is an account. If your registered email address is @FreeBSD.org, you will see the opt-in link on the right hand side of the webpages. For those of you who already have a FreshPorts account, but are not using your @FreeBSD.org email address, just change your email to @FreeBSD.org, subscribe, then change it back again.

FreshPorts also has a sanity test feature which automatically tests each commit to the FreeBSD ports tree. If subscribed to this service, you will be notified of any errors which FreshPorts detects during sanity testing of your commits.

For questions about the FreeBSD ports system, e-mail <[email protected]>.
For questions about this documentation, e-mail <[email protected]>.