Be sure to add a RCS ID line as the first thing in any PLIST file you write:

@comment $NetBSD: plist.html,v 1.91 2015/03/07 21:32:41 tnn Exp $
    

You can use the make print-PLIST command to output a PLIST that matches any new files since the package was extracted. See Section 17.17, “Other helpful targets” for more information on this target.

If you have used any of the *-dirs packages, as explained in Section 13.9, “Sharing directories between packages”, you may have noticed that make print-PLIST outputs a set of @comments instead of real @dirrm lines. You can also do this for specific directories and files, so that the results of that command are very close to reality. This helps a lot during the update of packages.

The PRINT_PLIST_AWK variable takes a set of AWK patterns and actions that are used to filter the output of print-PLIST. You can append any chunk of AWK scripting you like to it, but be careful with quoting.

For example, to get all files inside the libdata/foo directory removed from the resulting PLIST:

PRINT_PLIST_AWK+=       /^libdata\/foo/ { next; }
    

And to get all the @dirrm lines referring to a specific (shared) directory converted to @comments:

PRINT_PLIST_AWK+=       /^@dirrm share\/specific/ { print "@comment " $$0; next; }
    

A number of variables are substituted automatically in PLISTs when a package is installed on a system. This includes the following variables:

For a list of values which are replaced by default, the output of make help topic=PLIST_SUBST as well as searching the pkgsrc/mk directory with grep for PLIST_SUBST should help.

If you want to change other variables not listed above, you can add variables and their expansions to this variable in the following way, similar to MESSAGE_SUBST (see Section 11.5, “Optional files”):

PLIST_SUBST+=   SOMEVAR="somevalue"
    

This replaces all occurrences of “${SOMEVAR}” in the PLIST with “somevalue”.

The PLIST_VARS variable can be used to simplify the common case of conditionally including some PLIST entries. It can be done by adding PLIST_VARS+=foo and setting the corresponding PLIST.foo variable to yes if the entry should be included. This will substitute “${PLIST.foo}” in the PLIST with either “""” or “"@comment "”. For example, in Makefile:

PLIST_VARS+=	foo
.if condition
PLIST.foo=	yes
.else
    

And then in PLIST:

@comment $NetBSD: plist.html,v 1.91 2015/03/07 21:32:41 tnn Exp $
bin/bar
man/man1/bar.1
${PLIST.foo}bin/foo
${PLIST.foo}man/man1/foo.1
${PLIST.foo}share/bar/foo.data
${PLIST.foo}@dirrm share/bar
    

Man pages should be installed in compressed form if MANZ is set (in bsd.own.mk), and uncompressed otherwise. To handle this in the PLIST file, the suffix “.gz” is appended/removed automatically for man pages according to MANZ and MANCOMPRESSED being set or not, see above for details. This modification of the PLIST file is done on a copy of it, not PLIST itself.

To use one or more files as source for the PLIST used in generating the binary package, set the variable PLIST_SRC to the names of that file(s). The files are later concatenated using cat(1), and the order of things is important. The default for PLIST_SRC is ${PKGDIR}/PLIST.

Some packages decide to install a different set of files based on the operating system being used. These differences can be automatically handled by using the following files:

Some packages decide to generate hard-to-guess file names during installation that are hard to wire down.

In such cases, you can set the GENERATE_PLIST variable to shell code terminated (with a semicolon) that will output PLIST entries which will be appended to the PLIST

You can find one example in editors/xemacs:

      GENERATE_PLIST+=        ${ECHO} bin/${DISTNAME}-`${WRKSRC}/src/xemacs -sd`.dmp ;
    

which will append something like bin/xemacs-21.4.23-54e8ea71.dmp to the PLIST.

A “shared directory” is a directory where multiple (and unrelated) packages install files. These directories were problematic because you had to add special tricks in the PLIST to conditionally remove them, or have some centralized package handle them.

In pkgsrc, it is now easy: Each package should create directories and install files as needed; pkg_delete will remove any directories left empty after uninstalling a package.

If a package needs an empty directory to work, create the directory during installation as usual, and also add an entry to the PLIST:

@pkgdir path/to/empty/directory
    

or take a look at MAKE_DIRS and OWN_DIRS.