Table of Contents
When you find a package that is not yet in pkgsrc, you most likely have a URL from where you can download the source code. Starting with this URL, creating a package involves only a few steps.
First, install the packages pkgtools/url2pkg and pkgtools/pkglint.
Then, choose one of the top-level directories as the
category in which you want to place your package. You can also create a
directory of your own (maybe called local). In that
category directory, create another directory for your package and change
into it.
Run the program url2pkg, which will ask
you for a URL. Enter the URL of the distribution file (in most cases a
.tar.gz file) and watch how the basic ingredients
of your package are created automatically. The distribution file is
extracted automatically to fill in some details in the
Makefile that would otherwise have to be done
manually.
Examine the extracted files to determine the dependencies of
your package. Ideally, this is mentioned in some
README file, but things may differ. For each of
these dependencies, look where it exists in pkgsrc, and if there is a
file called buildlink3.mk in that directory, add a
line to your package Makefile which includes that
file just before the last line. If the
buildlink3.mk file does not exist, it must be
created first. The buildlink3.mk file makes sure that the package's include files and libraries are provided.
If you just need binaries from a package, add a
DEPENDS line to the Makefile, which specifies the
version of the dependency and where it can be found in pkgsrc. This line
should be placed in the third paragraph. If the dependency is only
needed for building the package, but not when using it, use
BUILD_DEPENDS instead of DEPENDS.
Your package may then look like this:
[...] BUILD_DEPENDS+= libxslt-[0-9]*:../../textproc/libxslt DEPENDS+= screen-[0-9]*:../../misc/screen DEPENDS+= screen>=4.0:../../misc/screen [...] .include "../../category/package/buildlink3.mk" .include "../../devel/glib2/buildlink3.mk" .include "../../mk/bsd.pkg.mk"
Run pkglint to see what things still need to be done to make your package a “good” one. If you don't know what pkglint's warnings want to tell you, try pkglint --explain or pkglint -e, which outputs additional explanations.
In many cases the package is not yet ready to build. You can find instructions for the most common cases in the next section, Section 10.1, “Common types of packages”. After you have followed the instructions over there, you can hopefully continue here.
Run bmake clean to clean the working
directory from the extracted files. Besides these files, a lot of cache
files and other system information has been saved in the working
directory, which may become wrong after you edited the
Makefile.
Now, run bmake to build the package. For the various things that can go wrong in this phase, consult Chapter 19, Making your package work.
When the package builds fine, the next step is to install the package. Run bmake install and hope that everything works.
Up to now, the file PLIST, which
contains a list of the files that are installed by the package, is
nearly empty. Run bmake print-PLIST
>PLIST to generate a probably correct list. Check
the file using your preferred text editor to see if the list of
files looks plausible.
Run pkglint again to see if the generated
PLIST contains garbage or not.
When you ran bmake install, the package
has been registered in the database of installed files, but with an
empty list of files. To fix this, run bmake deinstall
and bmake install again. Now the package is
registered with the list of files from
PLIST.
Run bmake package to create a binary package from the set of installed files.
Simple Perl modules are handled automatically by url2pkg, including dependencies.
KDE3 applications should always include
meta-pkgs/kde3/kde3.mk, which contains numerous
settings that are typical of KDE3 packages.
Python modules and programs packages are easily created using a set of predefined variables.
If some Python versions are not supported by the software, set the
PYTHON_VERSIONS_INCOMPATIBLE variable to the Python versions
that are not supported, e.g.
PYTHON_VERSIONS_INCOMPATIBLE= 26
If the packaged software is a Python module, include
“../../lang/python/extension.mk”.
In this case, the package directory should be called
“py-software” and PKGNAME should be set to
“${PYPKGPREFIX}-${DISTNAME}”, e.g.
DISTNAME= foopymodule-1.2.10
PKGNAME= ${PYPKGPREFIX}-${DISTNAME}
If it is an application, include
“../../lang/python/application.mk”.
In order to correctly set the path to the Python interpreter, use the
REPLACE_PYTHON variable and set it to the list of files
(paths relative to WRKSRC) that must be corrected.
For example:
REPLACE_PYTHON= *.py
Most Python packages use either “distutils” or
easy-setup (“eggs”).
If the software uses “distutils”, include
“../../lang/python/distutils.mk”.
so pkgsrc will use this framework.
“distutils” uses a script called setup.py,
if the “distutils” driver is not called
setup.py, set the PYSETUP variable
to the name of the script.
Otherwise, if the packaged software is egg-aware, you only need
to include
“../../lang/python/egg.mk”.
Some Python modules have separate distributions for Python-2.x
and Python-3.x support. In pkgsrc this is handled by the
versioned_dependencies.mk file. Set
PYTHON_VERSIONED_DEPENDENCIES to the list of
packages that should be depended upon and include
“../../lang/python/versioned_dependencies.mk”,
then the pkgsrc infrastructure will depend on the appropriate package
version. For example:
PYTHON_VERSIONED_DEPENDENCIES=dateutil dns
Look inside versioned_dependencies.mk for a list
of supported packages.
Looking at the file pkgsrc/doc/TODO, I saw
that the “nvu” package has not yet been imported into
pkgsrc. As the description says it has to do with the web, the obvious
choice for the category is “www”.
$mkdir www/nvu$cd www/nvu
The web site says that the sources are available as a tar file, so I fed that URL to the url2pkg program:
$ url2pkg http://cvs.nvu.com/download/nvu-1.0-sources.tar.bz2
My editor popped up, and I added a PKGNAME line
below the DISTNAME line, as the package name should
not have the word “sources” in it. I also filled in the
MAINTAINER, HOMEPAGE and
COMMENT fields. Then the package
Makefile looked like that:
# $NetBSD: creating.html,v 1.90 2015/03/07 21:32:40 tnn Exp $ # DISTNAME= nvu-1.0-sources PKGNAME= nvu-1.0 CATEGORIES= www MASTER_SITES= http://cvs.nvu.com/download/ EXTRACT_SUFX= .tar.bz2 MAINTAINER= [email protected] HOMEPAGE= http://cvs.nvu.com/ COMMENT= Web Authoring System # url2pkg-marker (please do not remove this line.) .include "../../mk/bsd.pkg.mk"
Then, I quit the editor and watched pkgsrc downloading a large source archive:
url2pkg> Running "make makesum" ... => Required installed package digest>=20010302: digest-20060826 found => Fetching nvu-1.0-sources.tar.bz2 Requesting http://cvs.nvu.com/download/nvu-1.0-sources.tar.bz2 100% |*************************************| 28992 KB 150.77 KB/s00:00 ETA 29687976 bytes retrieved in 03:12 (150.77 KB/s) url2pkg> Running "make extract" ... => Required installed package digest>=20010302: digest-20060826 found => Checksum SHA1 OK for nvu-1.0-sources.tar.bz2 => Checksum RMD160 OK for nvu-1.0-sources.tar.bz2 work.bacc -> /tmp/roland/pkgsrc/www/nvu/work.bacc ===> Installing dependencies for nvu-1.0 ===> Overriding tools for nvu-1.0 ===> Extracting for nvu-1.0 url2pkg> Adjusting the Makefile. Remember to correct CATEGORIES, HOMEPAGE, COMMENT, and DESCR when you're done! Good luck! (See pkgsrc/doc/pkgsrc.txt for some more help :-)
Now that the package has been extracted, let's see what's inside
it. The package has a README.txt, but that only
says something about mozilla, so it's probably useless for seeing what
dependencies this package has. But since there is a GNU configure script
in the package, let's hope that it will complain about everything it
needs.
$ bmake
=> Required installed package digest>=20010302: digest-20060826 found
=> Checksum SHA1 OK for nvu-1.0-sources.tar.bz2
=> Checksum RMD160 OK for nvu-1.0-sources.tar.bz2
===> Patching for nvu-1.0
===> Creating toolchain wrappers for nvu-1.0
===> Configuring for nvu-1.0
[...]
configure: error: Perl 5.004 or higher is required.
[...]
WARNING: Please add USE_TOOLS+=perl to the package Makefile.
[...]
That worked quite well. So I opened the package Makefile in my
editor, and since it already has a USE_TOOLS line, I
just appended “perl” to it. Since the dependencies of the
package have changed now, and since a perl wrapper is automatically
installed in the “tools” phase, I need to build the package
from scratch.
$bmake clean ===> Cleaning for nvu-1.0$bmake [...] *** /tmp/roland/pkgsrc/www/nvu/work.bacc/.tools/bin/make is not \ GNU Make. You will not be able to build Mozilla without GNU Make. [...]
So I added “gmake” to the
USE_TOOLS line and tried again (from scratch).
[...] checking for GTK - version >= 1.2.0... no *** Could not run GTK test program, checking why... [...]
Now to the other dependencies. The first question is: Where is the GTK package hidden in pkgsrc?
$echo ../../*/gtk* [many packages ...]$echo ../../*/gtk ../../x11/gtk$echo ../../*/gtk2 ../../x11/gtk2$echo ../../*/gtk2/bui* ../../x11/gtk2/buildlink3.mk
The first try was definitely too broad. The second one had exactly one result, which is very good. But there is one pitfall with GNOME packages. Before GNOME 2 had been released, there were already many GNOME 1 packages in pkgsrc. To be able to continue to use these packages, the GNOME 2 packages were imported as separate packages, and their names usually have a “2” appended. So I checked whether this was the case here, and indeed it was.
Since the GTK2 package has a buildlink3.mk
file, adding the dependency is very easy. I just inserted an
.include line before the last line of the package
Makefile, so that it now looks like this:
[...] .include "../../x11/gtk2/buildlink3.mk" .include "../../mk/bsd.pkg.mk
After another bmake clean && bmake, the answer was:
[...] checking for gtk-config... /home/roland/pkg/bin/gtk-config checking for GTK - version >= 1.2.0... no *** Could not run GTK test program, checking why... *** The test program failed to compile or link. See the file config.log for the *** exact error that occured. This usually means GTK was incorrectly installed *** or that you have moved GTK since it was installed. In the latter case, you *** may want to edit the gtk-config script: /home/roland/pkg/bin/gtk-config configure: error: Test for GTK failed. [...]
In this particular case, the assumption that “every package
prefers GNOME 2” had been wrong. The first of the lines above
told me that this package really wanted to have the GNOME 1 version of
GTK. If the package had looked for GTK2, it would have looked for
pkg-config instead of gtk-config.
So I changed the x11/gtk2 to
x11/gtk in the package Makefile,
and tried again.
[...] cc -o xpidl.o -c -DOSTYPE=\"NetBSD3\" -DOSARCH=\"NetBSD\" [...] In file included from xpidl.c:42: xpidl.h:53:24: libIDL/IDL.h: No such file or directory In file included from xpidl.c:42: xpidl.h:132: error: parse error before "IDL_ns" [...]
The package still does not find all of its dependencies. Now the
question is: Which package provides the
libIDL/IDL.h header file?
$echo ../../*/*idl* ../../devel/py-idle ../../wip/idled ../../x11/acidlaunch$echo ../../*/*IDL* ../../net/libIDL
Let's take the one from the second try. So I included the
../../net/libIDL/buildlink3.mk file and tried
again. But the error didn't change. After digging through some of the
code, I concluded that the build process of the package was broken and
couldn't have ever worked, but since the Mozilla source tree is quite
large, I didn't want to fix it. So I added the following to the package
Makefile and tried again:
CPPFLAGS+= -I${BUILDLINK_PREFIX.libIDL}/include/libIDL-2.0
BUILDLINK_TRANSFORM+= -l:IDL:IDL-2
The latter line is needed because the package expects the library
libIDL.so, but only
libIDL-2.so is available. So I told the compiler
wrapper to rewrite that on the fly.
The next problem was related to a recent change of the FreeType
interface. I looked up in www/seamonkey
which patch files were relevant for this issue and copied them to the
patches directory. Then I retried, fixed the
patches so that they applied cleanly and retried again. This time,
everything worked.