Questions when building Portfile?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Feb 16, 2014, at 15:25, julien Touche 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.

Distfiles are kept indefinitely, unless you deliberately run “sudo port clean --dist <PORTNAME>” or “sudo port clean --all <PORTNAME>”.

Ports that fetch from a revision control system like Subversion or Git re-fetch every time. This inefficiency should be corrected; that’s https://trac.macports.org/ticket/16373 .

> - 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?

There is no mechanism for marking configuration files. That’s https://trac.macports.org/ticket/2365 . Until we implement that, ports need to handle it manually. There are many example ports you can look at.

> - for web components/ui which relies on apache1/2/nginx or else as web server, what should be the right prefix? ${prefix}/www/${name} ? I think we should make available if not already a default sane config to be included for apache/nginx.

As far as I know, no decision was ever made about a standard directory for that. I would still welcome such a decision, and standardization of this among existing ports.

> - is there any documentation to build sub-port? especially in regards of devel package option.

I’m not aware of any documentation about subports yet. Read the portfiles of existing ports that have subports.