On Tuesday, April 17, 2012 12:42 CEST, Laurence Rochfort <[email protected]> wrote: > Thank you everyone for the kind advice. > > I think I have a correct understanding of packges/ports and shall > double check if what I need isn't already there. > > I'm meant to be working right now, ahem, so I'll investigate further > when I get home and try to work this out myself. > > Is this the correct mailing list to ask questions should I have > problems linking required libraries?
You are probably better suited then on the ports@ mailing list. When I find a software which is not as package or in the ports tree available, the first thing is to try to leverage the ports infrastructure to get me started. I usually take a port directory where I think it might be similar, copy that over, and start working from there. If you don't know about how the ports infrastructure works, you should take a look here: http://www.openbsd.org/faq/ports/ Also consult other ports as examples. Starting with a port, instead of just trying to compile things from source in e.g. your home directory might sound like a huge task. But starting with the right thing in the beginning, will pay out at the end. cheers, Sebastian > > On 17 April 2012 11:33, Marc Espie <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 12:30:18PM +0200, Marc Espie wrote: > >> If you really want to look at things, compiling the port is very easy, > though > >> it will usually take longer (sometimes much longer for monsters like > >> libreoffice). It's as stupid as cd /usr/ports/lang/swi-prolog && make > install > >> > >> Most software compiles just fine on OpenBSD. It's just that if you want > >> to do it by hand, you have to hunt for the dependencies, and give the > right > >> environment/options to configure. > > > > Another way to look at things is that the ports system is mostly > "Automated" > > hand builds. > > > > It was designed to be as transparent as possible. Apart from the > paraphernalia > > needed to version packages, handle lists of files, and track dependencies, > > it's just fetch/extract/patch/configure/build/install (obvious > > oversimplification), but it's not something arcane and impossible > > to understand.
