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Date:      Sun, 2 Apr 2000 12:38:31 +0200
From:      J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de>
To:        John_David_Galt@acm.org
Cc:        freebsd-ports@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: misc/16825: "team.c" won't compile
Message-ID:  <20000402123831.23393@uriah.heep.sax.de>
In-Reply-To: <38E7054D.180389D9@acm.org>; from John_David_Galt@acm.org on Sun, Apr 02, 2000 at 12:31:09AM -0800
References:  <200002192056.MAA75521@freefall.freebsd.org> <20000402095705.05247@uriah.heep.sax.de> <38E7054D.180389D9@acm.org>

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(Removed freebsd-gnats-submit, this doesn't belong into the PR trail
anymore, and redirected to freebsd-ports so the ports folks can
actually read it.  I therefore also provide a full quote which i
normally wouldn't do.)

As John_David_Galt@acm.org wrote:

> J Wunsch wrote:
> > 
> > As John_David_Galt@acm.org wrote:
> > 
> >> "team.c", in /cdrom/distfiles/team-3.1.tar.gz of CD #4, won't compile.
> >> cc complains that the type "sys_errlist" is already defined.
> > 
> > I'm afraid i can't follow you.  You are actually trying to compile the
> > port, or are you just picking the distfile, and rolling your own?  The
> > port takes care of setting the required -D switches to the compiler:
> 
> I'm "picking the distfile and rolling my own", and not by choice.

But then, you should not provide PRs for a port that is working
properly.  Note that the purpose of the `patches' subdirectory is just
to collect all the fixes and tweaks people have found to be necessary
to make something FreeBSD-compliant.  If you then omit them, you
should not be surprised.  Modifying the distfiles directly is
something that is i) outside of our power, and ii) we don't even want
(so we can easily pick the distfiles from whomever is maintaining them
in their original form).

> FreeBSD's ports installation program is basically broken, because it
> assumes and requires that the machine be connected to the Internet
> successfully before it can be used.  The problem is that if the install
> program fails to find a file it wants in /usr/ports/distfiles, it tries
> to download it from www.freebsd.org, rather than first looking in /cdrom
> (or telling you to mount the correct CD if the file is not on the one
> you have in the CD drive).

(Btw., you can always install the binary packages that don't require
any distfile at all.)

Last time i tried it, it _did_ first try to fetch it from
/cdrom/distfiles/, if that directory was present in the system.  Alas,
space on the CD-ROM is scarce these days, so only few distfiles are
actually present, precompiled binary packages get precedence on the
CD.

Also, you can always manually carry the distfiles over to
/usr/ports/distfiles/, wherever you've got them from.

Finally, there's an option to just fetch distfiles only (e. g. if you
can carry the machine to another location with Internet connectivity
and just wanna get all the required stuff from the net), by saying
`make fetch'.

> Since several of the ports packages must be installed before a machine
> using PPP is capable of connecting to the Internet, this makes the

Huh?  /usr/bin/ppp, /usr/bin/pppd and /usr/sbin/slattach are in the
base system, so even if your Internet connectivity is not provided by
Ethernet, you've got some options.  Even sysinstall itself can already
use PPP over a modem to fetch whatever is needed to install the
machine.

Sorry, but did you actually read the documentation?

> program completely unusable.  FreeBSD should not be limited to people
> whose employers or schools provide dedicated net connections!

I've been using dialup connections to the network for something like
eight years now, and it all works fine for me.  I cannot follow your
bitching, sorry. (These days, i'm connected through ISDN which
requires a customized kernel, but trust me, i've been using modem SLIP
and PPP for years, too.  And yes, i have to pay for my connectivity,
per minute.)

> Furthermore, examining the makefiles provided in the ports packages does
> not offer any clue as to how the installation process works, so one is
> simply forced to guess as I have done.

Well, you need some ability to read Makefiles...  In particular, if
you pretend you know nothing and there were not any documentation
(just for a minute -- there's of course enough documentation in the
handbook about how it works), so you've just got the port's Makefile
only, you should at least spot the line saying:

.include <bsd.port.mk>

If you don't know where to find make(1)'s includes, run the command
`man make' then.  It'll tell you it's under /usr/share/mk/.  Looking
into the file bsd.port.mk there, you'll see that's actually only a
redirect to /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.port.mk (that redirection has simply
proven to be useful so the ports-related Makefile stuff can be managed
together with the ports).  If you finally browse through that file, it
starts with some 400 lines of documentation about what all the various
variables and targets mean.

But admittedly, the description in the handbook is probably easier to
read.  And no, you don't necessarily need an Internet connection for
the handbook, /usr/share/doc/en_US.ISO_8859-1/books/handbook/book.txt
provides a plain text form you can read with more(1) if you didn't
install any Web browser to more comfortably read the HTML version.

-- 
cheers, J"org  /  73 de DL8DTL

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)


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