[nycbug-talk] Building FreeBSD packages without installing

[Charles Sprickman]

On Tue, 10 Jan 2006, Marc Spitzer wrote:

> On 1/10/06, Charles Sprickman <spork at bway.net> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm building a few hundred ports that will get shoved to another machine
>> when done.  I have no desire to actually have these ports installed on the
>> build machine...  Looking at the ports manpage and the handbook, this is
>> not possible ("make package" and "make package-recursive" install then
>> build the pkg from the installed files).
>>
>> I know OpenBSD handles this well, in fact they seem to default to building
>> a package and THEN install that.  Very nifty.
>>
>> Are there any tricks to emulate this behaviour in FreeBSD, like somehow
>> installing into a dummy hierarchy?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Charles
>
> you could do it in a jail.

I found a few other things that kind of work...  But there are issues. 
First off, you can set LOCAL_BASE to something like /usr/local/pkgbuild 
and set PKG_DBDIR to something like /var/db/pkgbuild and the port will 
install and register into these dummy directories.

A few gotchas there...  things like perl that like to hit /etc/make.conf 
and /etc/manpath.conf will still spam those files.  I'm sure there are 
plenty of other odd gotchas where the port fiddles with things outside of 
LOCAL_BASE.  Also, if you just pkg_add the pkg in the jail, it will 
dutifully install into your dummy LOCAL_BASE in the jail.  Using the "-P" 
flag seems to fix this, but again, I bet there's some cases where that 
does not quite work.

Doing more googling seems to indicate that while lots of people request 
the "build package without installing it" option, FreeBSD won't be seeing 
this anytime soon since attempting a change like that is likely to break 
things left and right.

So I'm somewhat sold on the jail idea...  I don't want a full-fledged 
jail, anyone have pointers to how to build the most minimal of jails?  I 
don't even want to ssh to it, I'd just like to start it with a shell and 
not call /etc/rc, do my work, then exit the shell.  Maybe I shouldn't even 
be worrying about trimming it, I do have the disk space...

Thoughts?

Thanks,

Charles

> marc
>
>
>>
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>
>
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> "We trained very hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to
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>