FreeBSD Ports: New Contributors 101

First up, thank you for deciding to dedicate your time and effort to the FreeBSD community and to make things better.

This guide is designed to be lightweight, get you ramped up quickly, and save you time and effort. Is it not exhaustive.

• Create a dedicated Email address. But expect spam (Gmail is good).
• Create a FreeBSD Bugzilla account.
  • Set your Full Name (for credit in commit logs).
• Set DEVELOPER=yes in /etc/make.conf (turns on lots of QA/error/sanity checks).

At a minimum:

• Porttools ports-mgmt/porttools (installs portlint)
• Portlint ports-mgmt/portlint
• Poudriere ports-mgmt/poudriere

For bonus points:

• GitLab, Bitbucket or GitHub account for managing a ports tree
• Mercurial or Git

• FreeBSD Porters Handbook
• FreeBSD Issue Tracker
• FreeBSD Portscout
• FreshPorts
• FreeBSD Ports Monitor (portsmon)
  • It's being down for maintenance at the moment (2018.04.28)

• EFNet IRC: #bsdports, #freebsd-bugbusters
• Libera.Chat IRC: #freebsd-ports, #freebsd (You'll need to register your nickname: /ns help register)
• Twitter: @FreeBSDHelp

Create a place where you'll keep your local ports, ~username/ports is fine.

Setup your ~username/.porttools configuration (read porttools(5)).

1. Copy the category/port you want to modify from /usr/ports into your local tree
2. Make your changes
3. Test your changes (portlint, poudriere, unit tests, etc)
4. Submit your changes

Here it is in action

cp -Rp /usr/ports/category/portname ~username/ports/category
# make some changes
port test
# fix reported issues
port test
port diff

Looks good!

port diff > patch.diff

Create new Bugzilla issue.

Attach patch.diff to issue.

The following work in port directories (ie: category/port)

• make makesum When you change what files a port downloads (updates distinfo file)

• make makepatch Automatically creates patches in files/ using filename/filename.orig pairs)

• make -V VARIABLE Check the value of a make VARIABLE

• Notes for workshops introducing to porting on FreeBSD
• How to maintain a port 101 by if0 (bitbucket.org/if0/freebsd-kanboard/)

Based on FreeBSD Ports: New Contributors 101 by KubilayKocak