Chapter 8. Advanced pkg-plist Practices

Some ports, particularly the p5- ports, need to change their pkg-plist depending on what options they are configured with (or version of perl, in the case of p5- ports). To make this easy, any instances in pkg-plist of %%OSREL%%, %%PERL_VER%%, and %%PERL_VERSION%% will be substituted appropriately. The value of %%OSREL%% is the numeric revision of the operating system (for example, 4.9). %%PERL_VERSION%% and %%PERL_VER%% is the full version number of perl (for example, 5.8.9). Several other %%VARS%% related to port’s documentation files are described in the relevant section.

To make other substitutions, set PLIST_SUB with a list of VAR=VALUE pairs and instances of %%VAR%% will be substituted with VALUE in pkg-plist.

For instance, if a port installs many files in a version-specific subdirectory, use a placeholder for the version so that pkg-plist does not have to be regenerated every time the port is updated. For example, set:

in the Makefile and use %%OCTAVE_VERSION%% wherever the version shows up in pkg-plist. When the port is upgraded, it will not be necessary to edit dozens (or in some cases, hundreds) of lines in pkg-plist.

If files are installed conditionally on the options set in the port, the usual way of handling it is prefixing pkg-plist lines with a %%OPT%% for lines needed when the option is enabled, or %%NO_OPT%% when the option is disabled, and adding OPTIONS_SUB=yes to the Makefile. See OPTIONS_SUB for more information.

For instance, if there are files that are only installed when the X11 option is enabled, and Makefile has:

In pkg-plist, put %%X11%% in front of the lines only being installed when the option is enabled, like this :

This substitution will be done between the pre-install and do-install targets, by reading from PLIST and writing to TMPPLIST (default: WRKDIR/.PLIST.mktmp). So if the port builds PLIST on the fly, do so in or before pre-install. Also, if the port needs to edit the resulting file, do so in post-install to a file named TMPPLIST.

Another way of modifying a port’s packing list is based on setting the variables PLIST_FILES and PLIST_DIRS. The value of each variable is regarded as a list of pathnames to write to TMPPLIST along with PLIST contents. While names listed in PLIST_FILES and PLIST_DIRS are subject to %%VAR%% substitution as described above, it is better to use the ${VAR} directly. Except for that, names from PLIST_FILES will appear in the final packing list unchanged, while @dir will be prepended to names from PLIST_DIRS. To take effect, PLIST_FILES and PLIST_DIRS must be set before TMPPLIST is written, that is, in pre-install or earlier.

From time to time, using OPTIONS_SUB is not enough. In those cases, adding a specific TAG to PLIST_SUB inside the Makefile with a special value of @comment, makes package tools to ignore the line. For instance, if some files are only installed when the X11 option is on and the architecture is i386:

If the port installs configuration files to PREFIX/etc (or elsewhere) do not list them in pkg-plist. That will cause pkg delete to remove files that have been carefully edited by the user, and a re-installation will wipe them out.

Instead, install sample files with a filename.sample extension. The @sample macro automates this, see Expanding Package List with Keywords for what it does exactly. For each sample file, add a line to pkg-plist:

If there is a very good reason not to install a working configuration file by default, only list the sample filename in pkg-plist, without the @sample followed by a space part, and add a message pointing out that the user must copy and edit the file before the software will work.

A static package list is a package list which is available in the Ports Collection either as pkg-plist (with or without variable substitution), or embedded into the Makefile via PLIST_FILES and PLIST_DIRS. Even if the contents are auto-generated by a tool or a target in the Makefile before the inclusion into the Ports Collection by a committer (for example, using make makeplist), this is still considered a static list, since it is possible to examine it without having to download or compile the distfile.

A dynamic package list is a package list which is generated at the time the port is compiled based upon the files and directories which are installed. It is not possible to examine it before the source code of the ported application is downloaded and compiled, or after running a make clean.

While the use of dynamic package lists is not forbidden, maintainers should use static package lists wherever possible, as it enables users to grep(1) through available ports to discover, for example, which port installs a certain file. Dynamic lists should be primarily used for complex ports where the package list changes drastically based upon optional features of the port (and thus maintaining a static package list is infeasible), or ports which change the package list based upon the version of dependent software used. For example, ports which generate docs with Javadoc.

First, make sure the port is almost complete, with only pkg-plist missing. Running make makeplist will show an example for pkg-plist. The output of makeplist must be double checked for correctness as it tries to automatically guess a few things, and can get it wrong.

User configuration files should be installed as filename.sample, as it is described in Configuration Files. info/dir must not be listed and appropriate install-info lines must be added as noted in the info files section. Any libraries installed by the port must be listed as specified in the shared libraries section.

All keywords can also take optional arguments in parentheses. The arguments are owner, group, and mode. This argument is used on the file or directory referenced. To change the owner, group, and mode of a configuration file, use:

The arguments are optional. If only the group and mode need to be changed, use: