To get help when developing pkgsrc, the definitive source is this document, the pkgsrc guide. If you don't find anything here, there are alternatives: The built-in pkgsrc help, which is available after bootstrapping pkgsrc. Run bmake help topic=… to get help for any topic, such as a variable name like BUILD_DEFS, a make target like do-build, a missing C or C++ function like strcasecmp or any other topic. The available help topics are listed in . To see the value of a single variable, run bmake show-var VARNAME=X. To see the values of the most common variables, run bmake show-all. These variables are grouped by topic. To see the variables for a single topic, run bmake show-all-topic, for example bmake show-all-fetch. The tech-pkg mailing list, to which you can subscribe and then ask your questions. The #pkgsrc IRC channel, which is accessible via a web browser or by using a specialized chat program such as XChat. Pick any user name and join the channel #pkgsrc.