Re: Dports

[John Marino <dragonflybsd@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 5/24/2013 13:17, Gavin Reade wrote:
> Anyway enough babble, I had DFly 3.2 and upgraded to 3.4, lost my
> X server config, machine went dead (no virtual consoles) so I just
> installed a vanilla 3.4.

If you had an x86-64, it may have been the avx support that kill your 
packages.  They all have to be rebuilt.  Additionally, there seems to be 
an increasing number of reports of problems with pkgsrc xorg and 
DragonFly 3.4.

> Maybe a good idea, maybe not (thinking back to my Win95 days......).
> 'Course, the new thing is dports.  First thing I did was get the dports
> tree and install lynx.  I did a make&&  make install&&  make clean.
> However I have been reading stuff and there is another part.....
> pkg??.  My question is; is the general idea to use dports to
> build the package and then use pkg? to install it?
> How does pkg relate to dports?  Can dports install
> ready made binary packages (there seems to be no dports command).

There is no "dports" command.
"pkg" is what you want.

pkg is a binary package manager.  Pretty much all of the packages that 
build have already been built for you, so you don't need to compile 
them.  (see https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/howtos/HowToDPorts/)

pkg is also involved during the source builds.  pkg is an invisible 
dependency of every port, so it will always be built and installed for a 
source build if it's not already present.  You don't need to do anything 
special, including building it first (that happens automatically).

The "general" idea is that people should use the prebuilt packages.  If 
they need to build from scratch to change the options, or if the 
prebuilt version isn't available, they can and it integrates fine with 
the prebuilt versions.

Does that help?  It's pretty easy -- just look at "man pkg" or "pkg 
help" etc and it should make sense.

John