path: root/CHANGES

Updating Information for FreeBSD ports developers

This file is maintained by Erwin Lansing <erwin@FreeBSD.org> and
copyrighted by the FreeBSD Foundation.

This file contains major changes to ports and the ports infrastructure.
Intended audience are ports committers, maintainers and other
developers. User oriented changes should be submitted for inclusion
in the release notes.

All ports committers are allowed to commit to this file.

20040314:
    USE_LIBTOOL, USE_AUTOCONF, and USE_AUTOMAKE are now considered
    deprecated, and will be removed on or around June 1st 2004.
    All ports should now choose the specific version of the tool,
    using USE_LIBTOOL_VER, USE_AUTOCONF_VER, and USE_AUTOMAKE_VER.
    The old "system default" behavior can be written as follows:

    Old         New
    USE_LIBTOOL=yes     USE_LIBTOOL_VER=13
    USE_AUTOCONF=yes    USE_AUTOCONF_VER=213
    USE_AUTOMAKE=yes    USE_AUTOMAKE_VER=14

20040304:
    New variable MASTER_SITE_SOURCEFORGE_EXTENDED. It has the
    ten official sourceforge.net download mirrors, whereas
    MASTER_SITE_SOURCEFORGE only has five. To check if your
    port is mirrored there, go to
    <http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/${MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR}/>
    click on ${DISTFILES} and you'll see five or ten mirrors,
    corresponding to the variables above.

20040226:
    The default version of Ruby is now 1.8 on all platforms
    including the i386.

    Users on the i386 platform need to follow the instructions
    described in the UPDATING file to cope with this upgrade.

    Next time ruby is major upgraded, you won't need to do this
    kind of messy work because some subtle changes have been made
    to the ruby port infrastructure to make it easier to handle
    multiple versions of ruby.

20040217:
    Mozilla will now default to using GTK2, and will only compile
    against Gtk+-1.2 if explicitly requested.  This is in exact
    opposite to the old behaviour.

    The valid values of WITH_MOZILLA are now:
        mozilla         (www/mozilla, GTK2)
        mozilla-devel       (www/mozilla-devel, GTK2)
        mozilla-gtk1        (www/mozilla-gtk1, GTK1)
        mozilla-devel-gtk1  (www/mozilla-devel-gtk1, GTK1)
    
    As before, WITH_MOZILLA can be set in /etc/make.conf, but doing
    so is not advised unless you desire the development versions.
    GTK2 browsers will automatically compile against GTK2 mozilla,
    and GTK1 browsers (galeon1, galeon1, and galeon1) will
    automatically compile against GTK1.

    Again, the only people who will need to take action are those
    who desire development versions (which are inactive at this time
    anyway).  Those who want GTK1 mozilla-devel must set
    WITH_MOZILLA=mozilla-devel-gtk1 or they will be pleasantly
    surprised with their very own GTK2 installation on the next
    update.

    WITH_MOZILLA=mozilla-gtk2 and WITH_MOZILLA=mozilla-devel-gtk2
    are still honoured for the time being, but their use is
    now deprecated.  Any new ports are not required to consider
    their values, and so eventually WITH_MOZILLA _will_ have to
    be changed.

    Hopefully galeon2 can catch up to peoples' expectations from
    galeon1 soon, and we can remove the GTK1 ports altogether.

    
20040204:
    The bsd.php.mk file has been moved out of the lang/php4 port
    into the Mk directory.  This will make it much easier to include
    PHP support in PHP-dependent ports.  Instead of including
    bsd.php.mk directly, a port can simply set USE_PHP=yes, and the
    ports system with Do the Right Thing.

    All trailing whitespace has been removed from bsd.port.mk.

    Enhance the new OPTIONS code by only including saved options if
    the port defines OPTIONS, attempt to use LATEST_LINK as the
    unique name for a port (fall back to ${PKGNAMEPREFIX}${PORTNAME}
    otherwise), bring the ===> messages in line with the existing
    ones by using PKGNAME instead of PORTNAME, use PKGNAME in the
    dialog, use ECHO_CMD instead of ECHO_MSG to write the
    OPTIONSFILE, display a message during compilation indicating
    that user-specified options have been found, and make the output
    of the showconfig target a little more user-friendly.

    A new USE_ICONV macro has been added that takes the place of an
    explicit LIB_DEPENDS on converters/libiconv.  This will help
    with future shared lib version bumps.

    A new USE_GETTEXT macro has been added that takes the place of
    an explicit LIB_DEPENDS on devel/gettext.  This will help with
    future shared lib version bumps.

    Module::Build is a system for building, testing, and installing
    Perl modules.  It will eventually replace the obsoleted
    ExtUtils::MakeMaker.  Many new Perl modules have already
    switched to using Build.PL instead of Makefile.PL.  To
    facilitate building those modules, a new PERL_MODBUILD macro has
    been added.  Use that in place of PERL_CONFIGURE when porting
    Perl modules that make use of the Module::Build framework.

    Certain ports want to check for the availability of SDL
    libraries before including them.  This change adds a new
    WANT_SDL macro similar to WANT_GNOME.  By setting this, the
    porter indicates that her port can optional use SDL if present
    on the system.  WANT_SDL should be defined _before_
    bsd.port.pre.mk is included.  After including bsd.port.pre.mk,
    the list of available SDL components will be returned in the
    HAVE_SDL macro.  For details on how to process this component
    list, refer to bsd.sdl.mk.

    The OpenBSD and NetBSD projects diverged from the FreeBSD ports
    tree years ago, and it no longer make sense to include obsolete
    references to incorrect paths in the FreeBSD ports system.  This
    change removes the NetBSD and OpenBSD PORTSDIR compatibility
    bits from bsd.port.mk.

    The comment for PKGDIR read, ``A direction containing any
    package creating file.''  The word ``direction'' should be
    ``directory.''  This has been fixed.

    A new DIRNAME macro has been added that points to
    /usr/bin/dirname.  All direct use of dirname in ports can be
    switched to this macro.

    Direct use of commands dirname, id, and rm have been corrected
    to use their macro equivalents instead.  Some useless ${HEAD}
    -n 1 statements have been removed.  A strange comment in the
    do-install target and an out of place ``fi'' have been fixed as
    well.

    On 5-CURRENT after the 5.2-RELEASE split, the default Perl
    version has been updated from 5.6.1 to 5.8.2.  As well, some
    Perl definitions in bsd.port.mk have been moved to their correct
    locations which corrects the PERL_LEVEL definition.

    The following optimizations have been added to the ports system
    to speed up recursive operations such as make describe, make
    index, make ignorelist, etc.  bsd.gnome.mk is now only included
    if a port defines USE_GNOME, WANT_GNOME, and/or USE_GTK.  More
    variables are cached and passed down through bsd.port.subdir.mk.
    Perl is no longer invoked when a simple ``echo'' will do.  More
    subshell variable assignments have been hidden behind
    conditionals so that the commands are not spawned everytime.
    Finally, dependency lists are only constructed if ports actually
    declare dependencies.  These optimizations give make index
    approximately a 43% speedup.

    If CPUFLAGS is not defined (this _CPUCFLAGS is empty), trying
    to remove _CPUCFLAGS from CFLAGS will result in an error.  This
    change fixes that.

    On recent versions of 5.X, /etc/rc.subr exists, and there is no
    reason to install another copy in ${LOCALBASE}/etc.  The reason
    this was ever done was to workaround some build issues on bento.
    However, testing OSVERSION seems to work in spite of those build
    issues.

    The ports system now supports MySQL 3.23, 4.0, 4.1, and 5.0.
    Also, the ability to scale to newer versions was also but in
    place.

    An .endif comment indicated that the .if block checked
    WANT_MYSQL when, in fact, it was checking WANT_MYSQL_VER.  This
    has been corrected.

    The PTHREAD{CFLAGS,LIBS} macros have been made overridable on
    all versions of FreeBSD to allow for alternate threading
    implementations (e.g. -lc_r, -lthr, -mt, etc.).  The default
    threading library has been changed to -lpthread from -lc_r on
    -CURRENT.

    The new SIZE support broke distfiles fetching on FreeBSD < 4.8.
    On those versions of FreeBSD, the SIZE distfile attribute is now
    ignored.  Also, defining DISABLE_SIZE in, for example,
    /etc/make.conf, will ignore the SIZE attribute on all versions
    of FreeBSD.  This is useful with alternate values for FETCH_CMD.

    A new vulnerabilities database has been added to the ports
    system in order to keep more accurate, up-to-date, track of
    security vulnerabilities.  The ports system now knows how to
    query that database and dynamically prevents the installation
    of vulnerable ports.

    In order to allow for more rapid development of the package
    tools, the ports system will prefer to use pkg_* tools found in
    ${LOCALBASE} over those in the base system.  However, all PKG_*
    macros are still overridable.

    A new physical category, net-mgmt, has been created to house
    network management ports.

    The /var/db/port.mkversion file never really took off, and is
    now very obsolete.  Replace the code used to generate and check
    this file with a simple OSVERSION check.  The ports system now
    requires FreeBSD 4.3 or higher.

    The last round of bsd.*.mk changes broke ports that had
    duplicate distinfo entries (e.g. linux_base).  This is now
    fixed.  Along with this fix, only distfiles with a bad checksum
    will be refetched, where as distfiles missing from distinfo will
    not be refetched.

    The PLIST_{DIRS,FILES} macros were passed to the final package
    list unchanged by PLIST_SUB.  This is not always desirable.
    Now, those macros are passed through PLIST_SUB.

    The previous OPTIONS code assumed users would be running port
    build as root.  If this was not the case, OPTIONS configuration
    would fail.  Now, the bits of the config and rmconfig targets
    that require write access to system directories are run under
    SU_CMD.

    The makesum target will now add a SIZE attribute for each
    distfile by default.  This can be overridden by defining NO_SIZE
    in a port's Makefile.  Note: this could probably be expanded to
    omit SIZE attributes for specific distfiles in the future.

20040129:
    SIZE lines in distinfo files:  if you set USE_SIZE when you do "make
    makesum", the byte sizes of the distfiles will be listed in the
    distinfo file. Then, if a distfile is replaced on its master site with
    one of a different size than that listed, "make fetch" will fail with a
    "size mismatch" error before downloading the file and the user will be
    asked to fetch the file by hand. Also, a user will know the size of
    the distfiles before fetching and decide to fetch later.

20040129:
    Start of CHANGES file.

FORMAT:

This file contains a list, in reverse chronological order, of major
breakages or added features in tracking ports.  Not all things will be
listed here, and it only starts on January 29, 2004.

Copyright information:

Copyright 2004 FreeBSD Foundation All Rights Reserved.

Redistribution, publication, translation and use, with or without
modification, in full or in part, in any form or format of this
document are permitted without further permission from the author.

THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED BY FREEBSD FOUNDATION ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE
DISCLAIMED.  IN NO EVENT SHALL WARNER LOSH BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT,
INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES
(INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR
SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION)
HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT,
STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING
IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

If you find this document useful, and you want to, you may buy the
author a beer.

Contact Erwin Lansing if you have any questions about your use of
this document.

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