Step One: Suggested Filesystem Layout For the DragonFly builds I'm using: - /bulklog for the bulk meta data and log files of each package - /scratch as WRKOBJDIR - /distfiles as DISTDIR - /packages as PACKAGES - separate physical filesystems for /var and /usr/pkg All filesystems but those are read-only, /tmp and /dev need platform specific handling either as tmpfs or link. ptyfs helps for /dev. For parallel builds, /bulklog, /packages and /usr/pkgsrc are supposed to be shared (null mounts, NFS). /usr/pkg and /var/db/pkg needs to be per-node and /scratch should be per-node. Step Two: Preparing pbulk prefix Install pkgtools/pbulk and possibly helper programs like screen into LOCALBASE=/usr/pkg_bulk, PKG_DBDIR=/usr/pkg_bulk/.pkgdb. A full bootstrap is the recommented approach. Copy /usr/pkg_bulk to the client nodes for parallel builds. Step Three: Configure pbulk (a) Setup general build parameters in mk.conf. Below is an example fragment to add. (b) [not for netbsd] Build a binary bootstrap kit and override the included mk.conf with the file created in (a). Compress the tarball with gzip. (c) Edit /usr/pkg_bulk/etc/pbulk.conf: - For NetBSD: - pkg_install_prefix should be /usr. - bootstrapkit should be empty. - For non-NetBSD: - pkg_install_prefix should /usr/pkg_bulk. - make must be changed to /usr/pkg/bin/bmake. - bootstrapkit should be changed to the tarball in (b). Both master and client nodes access this, so keep it in a shared location. - master_mode=yes needs a proper list of client nodes. - base_url goes into the report mail, the rsync targets are used for uploads. - for limited bulk builds, set limited_list to a file with one location per line Step Four: Running pbulk /usr/pkg_bulk/bin/bulkbuild in screen runs the full build. /usr/pkg_bulk/libexec/pbulk/{pre-build,scan,build,report,upload} are the individual build phases. They depend on the execution of the phase before. Exceptions are report and upload which both depend on build. --- sample mk.conf fragment --- WRKOBJDIR = /scratch PKGSRCDIR = /usr/pkgsrc DISTDIR = /distfiles PACKAGES = /packages FAILOVER_FETCH= yes X11_TYPE= modular _ACCEPTABLE= yes ALLOW_VULNERABLE_PACKAGES= yes PKG_DEVELOPER?= yes