Questions when building Portfile?

[MK-MacPorts at techno.ms]

Hi Julien,

On 16 Feb 2014, at 22:25 , julien Touche <jul_bsd at yahoo.fr> wrote:
> I'm trying to build/refresh several portfile and have a few questions which didn't solve on guide or trac:
> - is there a way to keep downloaded distfiles? it seems when doing a clean, distfile (user or global) are removed which is a bit a pain when doing build multiples times and sometimes cleaning because else macports complains about something.
No, the distfiles get only deleted if you specify ‘port clean --dist’ !

> - what is the official ways to mark configuration files? I remembered a time where it was .sample but maybe I mix with another system. It seems .dist now, right? for now, macports seems to not creating default config when not existing (and keeping else). is there a way to do this?
Configuration files could be placed where they belong and have suffix ‘.default’. See e.g. in /opt/local/etc/macports/

> - is there any documentation to build sub-port? especially in regards of devel package option.
The guide is still missing information about sub-ports…
I also couldn’t find anything in the wiki quickly.

But you can read other port files to learn how to do it.
Perhaps start with something like mariadb which has the mariadb-server sub-port.

Greets,
Marko