This section contains hints, tips & tricks on special things in pkgsrc that we didn't find a better place for in the previous chapters, and it contains items for both pkgsrc users and developers. The following mailing lists may be of interest to pkgsrc users: pkgsrc-users: This is a general purpose list for most issues regarding pkgsrc, regardless of platform, e.g. soliciting user help for pkgsrc configuration, unexpected build failures, using particular packages, upgrading pkgsrc installations, questions regarding the pkgsrc release branches, etc. General announcements or proposals for changes that impact the pkgsrc user community, e.g. major infrastructure changes, new features, package removals, etc., may also be posted. pkgsrc-bulk: A list where the results of pkgsrc bulk builds are sent and discussed. pkgsrc-changes: This list is for those who are interested in getting a commit message for every change committed to pkgsrc. It is also available in digest form, meaning one daily message containing all commit messages for changes to the package source tree in that 24 hour period. To subscribe, do: &cprompt; echo subscribe listname | mail majordomo@NetBSD.org Archives for all these mailing lists are available from . Pkgviews is tightly integrated with buildlink. You can find a pkgviews User's guide in pkgsrc/mk/buildlink3/PKGVIEWS_UG. The directory pkgsrc/pkgtools contains a number of useful utilities for both users and developers of pkgsrc. This section attempts only to make the reader aware of the utilities and when they might be useful, and not to duplicate the documentation that comes with each package. Utilities used by pkgsrc (automatically installed when needed): pkgtools/x11-links: Symlinks for use by buildlink. OS tool augmentation (automatically installed when needed): pkgtools/digest: Calculates various kinds of checksums (including SHA1). pkgtools/libnbcompat: Compatibility library for pkgsrc tools. pkgtools/mtree: Installed on non-BSD systems due to lack of native mtree. pkgtools/pkg_install: Up-to-date replacement for /usr/sbin/pkg_install, or for use on operating systems where pkg_install is not present. Utilities used by pkgsrc (not automatically installed): pkgtools/pkg_tarup: Create a binary package from an already-installed package. Used by make replace to save the old package. pkgtools/dfdisk: Adds extra functionality to pkgsrc, allowing it to fetch distfiles from multiple locations. It currently supports the following methods: multiple CD-ROMs and network FTP/HTTP connections. pkgtools/xpkgwedge: Put X11 packages someplace else (enabled by default). devel/cpuflags: Determine the best compiler flags to optimise code for your current CPU and compiler. Utilities for keeping track of installed packages, being up to date, etc: pkgtools/pkg_chk: Reports on packages whose installed versions do not match the latest pkgsrc entries. pkgtools/pkgdep: Makes dependency graphs of packages, to aid in choosing a strategy for updating. pkgtools/pkgdepgraph: Makes graphs from the output of pkgtools/pkgdep (uses graphviz). pkgtools/pkglint: The pkglint(1) program checks a pkgsrc entry for errors. pkgtools/lintpkgsrc: The lintpkgsrc(1) program does various checks on the complete pkgsrc system. pkgtools/pkgsurvey: Report what packages you have installed. Utilities for people maintaining or creating individual packages: pkgtools/pkgdiff: Automate making and maintaining patches for a package (includes pkgdiff, pkgvi, mkpatches, etc.). pkgtools/rpm2pkg, pkgtools/url2pkg: Aids in converting to pkgsrc. pkgtools/gensolpkg: Convert pkgsrc to a Solaris package. Utilities for people maintaining pkgsrc (or: more obscure pkg utilities) pkgtools/pkg_comp: Build packages in a chrooted area. pkgtools/libkver: Spoof kernel version for chrooted cross builds. If you want to use pkgsrc as non-root user, you can set some variables to make pkgsrc work under these conditions. At the very least, you need to set UNPRIVILEGED to yes; this will turn on unprivileged mode and set multiple related variables to allow installation of packages as non-root. In case the defaults are not enough, you may want to tune some other variables used. For example, if the automatic user/group detection leads to incorrect values (or not the ones you would like to use), you can change them by setting UNPRIVILEGED_USER and UNPRIVILEGED_GROUP respectively. As regards bootstrapping, please note that the bootstrap script will ease non-root configuration when given the --ignore-user-check flag, as it will choose and use multiple default directories under ~/pkg as the installation targets. These directories can be overridden by the --prefix flag provided by the script, as well as some others that allow finer tuning of the tree layout. By default, resuming transfers in pkgsrc is disabled, but you can enable this feature by adding the option PKG_RESUME_TRANSFERS=YES into &mk.conf;. If, during a fetch step, an incomplete distfile is found, pkgsrc will try to resume it. You can also use a different program than the default &man.ftp.1; by changing the FETCH_USING variable. You can specify the program by using of ftp, fetch, wget or curl. Alternatively, fetching can be disabled by using the value manual. A value of custom disables the system defaults and dependency tracking for the fetch program. In that case you have to provide FETCH_CMD, FETCH_BEFORE_ARGS, FETCH_RESUME_ARGS, FETCH_OUTPUT_ARGS, FETCH_AFTER_ARGS. For example, if you want to use wget to download, you'll have to use something like: FETCH_USING= wget If you want to use modular X.org from pkgsrc instead of your system's own X11 (/usr/X11R6, /usr/openwin, ...) you will have to add the following line into &mk.conf;: X11_TYPE=modular The DragonFly operating system defaults to using modular X.org from pkgsrc. If you are sitting behind a firewall which does not allow direct connections to Internet hosts (i.e. non-NAT), you may specify the relevant proxy hosts. This is done using an environment variable in the form of a URL, e.g. in Amdahl, the machine orpheus.amdahl.com is one of the firewalls, and it uses port 80 as the proxy port number. So the proxy environment variables are: ftp_proxy=ftp://orpheus.amdahl.com:80/ http_proxy=http://orpheus.amdahl.com:80/ This depends on which utility is used to retrieve distfiles. From bsd.pkg.mk, FETCH_CMD is assigned the first available command from the following list: ${LOCALBASE}/bin/ftp /usr/bin/ftp On a default NetBSD installation, this will be /usr/bin/ftp, which automatically tries passive connections first, and falls back to active connections if the server refuses to do passive. For the other tools, add the following to your &mk.conf; file: PASSIVE_FETCH=1. Having that option present will prevent /usr/bin/ftp from falling back to active transfers. You would like to download all the distfiles in a single batch from work or university, where you can't run a make fetch. There is an archive of distfiles on ftp.NetBSD.org, but downloading the entire directory may not be appropriate. The answer here is to do a make fetch-list in /usr/pkgsrc or one of its subdirectories, carry the resulting list to your machine at work/school and use it there. If you don't have a NetBSD-compatible &man.ftp.1; (like tnftp) at work, don't forget to set FETCH_CMD to something that fetches a URL: At home: &cprompt; cd /usr/pkgsrc &cprompt; make fetch-list FETCH_CMD=wget DISTDIR=/tmp/distfiles >/tmp/fetch.sh &cprompt; scp /tmp/fetch.sh work:/tmp At work: &cprompt; sh /tmp/fetch.sh then tar up /tmp/distfiles and take it home. If you have a machine running NetBSD, and you want to get all distfiles (even ones that aren't for your machine architecture), you can do so by using the above-mentioned make fetch-list approach, or fetch the distfiles directly by running: &cprompt; make mirror-distfiles If you even decide to ignore NO_{SRC,BIN}_ON_{FTP,CDROM}, then you can get everything by running: &cprompt; make fetch NO_SKIP=yes When compiling the pkgtools/pkg_install package, you get the error from make that it doesn't know how to make /usr/share/tmac/tmac.andoc? This indicates that you don't have installed the text set (nroff, ...) from the NetBSD base distribution on your machine. It is recommended to do that to format man pages. In the case of the pkgtools/pkg_install package, you can get away with setting NOMAN=YES either in the environment or in &mk.conf;. You didn't install the compiler set, comp.tgz, when you installed your NetBSD machine. Please get and install it, by extracting it in /: &rprompt; cd / &rprompt; tar --unlink -zxvpf .../comp.tgz comp.tgz is part of every NetBSD release. Get the one that corresponds to your release (determine via uname -r). When installing packages as non-root user and using the just-in-time &man.su.1; feature of pkgsrc, it can become annoying to type in the root password for each required package installed. To avoid this, the sudo package can be used, which does password caching over a limited time. To use it, install sudo (either as binary package or from security/sudo) and then put the following into your &mk.conf;, somewhere after the definition of the LOCALBASE variable: .if exists(${LOCALBASE}/bin/sudo) SU_CMD= ${LOCALBASE}/bin/sudo /bin/sh -c .endif As the system administrator, you can choose where configuration files are installed. The default settings make all these files go into ${PREFIX}/etc or some of its subdirectories; this may be suboptimal depending on your expectations (e.g., a read-only, NFS-exported PREFIX with a need of per-machine configuration of the provided packages). In order to change the defaults, you can modify the PKG_SYSCONFBASE variable (in &mk.conf;) to point to your preferred configuration directory; some common examples include /etc or /etc/pkg. Furthermore, you can change this value on a per-package basis by setting the PKG_SYSCONFDIR.${PKG_SYSCONFVAR} variable. PKG_SYSCONFVAR's value usually matches the name of the package you would like to modify, that is, the contents of PKGBASE. Note that after changing these settings, you must rebuild and reinstall any affected packages. Please be aware that there can often be bugs in third-party software, and some of these bugs can leave a machine vulnerable to exploitation by attackers. In an effort to lessen the exposure, the NetBSD packages team maintains a database of known-exploits to packages which have at one time been included in pkgsrc. The database can be downloaded automatically, and a security audit of all packages installed on a system can take place. To do this, refer to the following two tools (installed as part of the pkgtools/pkg_install package): pkg_admin fetch-pkg-vulnerabilities, an easy way to download a list of the security vulnerabilities information. This list is kept up to date by the NetBSD security officer and the NetBSD packages team, and is distributed from the NetBSD ftp server: pkg_admin audit, an easy way to audit the current machine, checking each known vulnerability. If a vulnerable package is installed, it will be shown by output to stdout, including a description of the type of vulnerability, and a URL containing more information. Use of these tools is strongly recommended! After pkg_install is installed, please read the package's message, which you can get by running pkg_info -D pkg_install. If this package is installed, pkgsrc builds will use it to perform a security check before building any package. See for ways to control this check. When you add your own preferences to the CFLAGS variable in your &mk.conf;, these flags are passed in environment variables to the ./configure scripts and to &man.make.1;. Some package authors ignore the CFLAGS from the environment variable by overriding them in the Makefiles of their package. Currently there is no solution to this problem. If you really need the package to use your CFLAGS you should run make patch in the package directory and then inspect any Makefile and Makefile.in for whether they define CFLAGS explicitly. Usually you can remove these lines. But be aware that some smart programmers write so bad code that it only works for the specific combination of CFLAGS they have chosen. Make sure that your copy of pkgsrc is consistent. A case that occurs often is that people only update pkgsrc in parts, because of performance reasons. Since pkgsrc is one large system, not a collection of many small systems, there are sometimes changes that only work when the whole pkgsrc tree is updated. Make sure that you don't have any CVS conflicts. Search for <<<<<< or >>>>>> in all your pkgsrc files. Make sure that you don't have old copies of the packages extracted. Run make clean clean-depends to verify this. If the problem still exists, write a mail to the pkgsrc-users mailing list. You have modified a file from pkgsrc, and someone else has modified that same file afterwards in the CVS repository. Both changes are in the same region of the file, so when you updated pkgsrc, the cvs command marked the conflicting changes in the file. Because of these markers, the file is no longer a valid Makefile. Have a look at that file, and if you don't need your local changes anymore, you can remove that file and run cvs -q update -dP in that directory to download the current version.