Darwin Ports

What is Darwin Ports?

As every FreeBSD enthusiast I wanted to see the Ports Collection working on Darwin as soon as I installed Mac OS X on my Powerbook. Darwin Ports makes this possible. You will be able to compile, install and package most (hopefully someday) of ports from the FreeBSD collection.

Since other similar projects seem to be shutting down or stalling, I'm rehashing my Darwin Ports effort. I just updated the tarball to use a recent FreeBSD ports distribution (7.2).

Darwin pkg is not required anymore to use Darwin Ports and it is deprecated.

Quick start guide to Darwin Ports

Three steps to compile what you need from /usr/ports:

        $ cd
        $ curl -O ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/ports/ports.tar.gz
        $ cd /usr
        $ sudo tar zxf ~/ports.tar.gz
        [...this will take a long time...]

	$ curl -O http://alice.iscanet.com/~rlucia/devel/darwin_pkg/files/darwin_ports-latest.tar.gz
	$ tar zxf darwin_ports-latest.tar.gz
	$ cd darwin_ports
	$ sudo bsdmake install

        $ cd /usr/ports/irc/ircII
	$ sudo bsdmake
        $ sudo bsdmake install

What is Darwin Ports?

Darwin Ports will allow you to compile your ports using a Makefile infrastructure that give the "ports collection" a coherent environment to be built and packaged. Darwin Ports works with Apple provided bsdmake and compiler tool chain and the Darwin pkg tools (a port of FreeBSD's /usr/sbin/pkg_* tools to Darwin 10.2).

Requirements

As a ports user you will need a compiler (everything is packaged in the Apple Developer Tools bundled with your Mac OS X copy) and a bunch of tools you'll find on this website. In the first stage of the project you will also need to download the entire FreeBSD ports and then update/replace it with Darwin Ports.

How do I build a port?

Building a port is very easy: get into the directory of the port you want to build and install, and then issue the command freebsdmake install bsdmake install. The package source will be retrieved, extracted, configured, built and installed on your system. The port installation will also be tracked on your system as a package, you can list installed packages with pkg_info or delete them with pkg_delete name.

How do I install Darwin Ports on my Macintosh?

There are different ways to get Darwin Ports. You first need to download the FreeBSD Ports collection from a recent ports.tar.gz from the latest release and untar it into /usr. Then untar latest Darwin Ports patchkit and execute

sudo bsdmake install

Again What is Darwin Ports?

Darwin Ports is both a patchkit and a port of utilities from FreeBSD to Darwin. Basically it is composed by the following parts:

• some /usr/include/ files coming from FreeBSD
• libfetch, libmd and libutil coming from FreeBSD
• /usr/bin/fetch utility from FreeBSD
• /usr/sbin/pkg_* from FreeBSD
• patches to FreeBSD sources and ports collection to make everything work
• a simple Makefile for installation

Notes:

• don't forget you should use "freebsdmake" "bsdmake" instead of "make"
• All ports will be installed under /usr/local, so remember to add bin/sbin dir to your path (e.g. add the line export PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:$PATH to your ~/.profile ).
• I still did not completely patch the mechanism to create dylibs, so there's still need to wait if your ports needs iconv, just to name one.
• /usr/bin/freebsdmake, /usr/bin/freebsdsed, /usr/bin/freebsdpatch and /usr/bin/fetch were just the FreeBSD utilities as of 4.7-RC2 sources but from 0.4 release they are not needed anymore.
• IMPORTANT IMPORTANT IMPORTANT: There was a serious bug into Darwin Ports 0.5. The installation overwrote a vital symlink into /usr/lib, to fix your Mac follow the following steps:

  	# rm /usr/lib/libutil.dylib
  	# ln -s /usr/lib/libutil1.0.dylib /usr/lib/libutil.dylib
  

  If your Mac doesn't boot anymore, don't be scared :-) Just boot with your OS on DVD (insert the disk into the drive and press C while turning on the computer), then start a Terminal window and run the following commands:

  	# cd /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/usr/lib
  	# rm libutil.dylib
  	# ln -s libutil1.0.dylib libutil.dylib
  

  Macintosh HD is a placeholder for your boot drive name.

Other Darwin Tips

If you want to read your local manual pages:

ln -s /usr/local/man /usr/local/share/man

Or.. just in case you need to boot single user press at boot :-)

Try pressing T at boot. This will transform your Macintosh into an external FireWire drive (look for Target Disk Mode into the docs).

Other references

• Darwin pkg, a patch to FreeBSD packaging tools for darwin.
• Darwin packages, some old packages from ports as I compile them (w/o texinfo files until I'll fix it).
• The FreeBSD Ports collection chapter of FreeBSD Handbook.
• Open Packages is a more complete and solid project that will be adopted as the official Darwin ports/packaging system. The project disappeared.
• DarwinPorts MacPorts is the latest ports/packages infrastructure for Mac OS X, maybe it's what you expected from this project? ;-)
• My old homepage