Ideas for packaging FreeBSD binaries

[Aurelien Jarno]

> Hi,
> 
> 
> While trying to find a good way to package the FreeBSD ipfw binaries,
> and keeping the sources in sync with upstream FreeBSD sources, I came up
> with the following.
> 
> I took the sources for /sbin binaries from
> ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/5.4-RELEASE/src/, and
> built a package around it. This is done the same way I found in the
> apache package.

Well the other possibility is also to get the sources from CVS, it's the 
way the kernel and freebsd5-buildutils are done.

> - From the sbin sources several tools can be built, for which we now have
> seperate packages (such as kldutils) or, something that has to change
> anyway, binary-source packages such as kfreebsd-utils.
> 
> So I now have one 'big' source package that builds binary packages
> atacontrol and kldutils. From the same source packages such as mount and
> net-tools (ifconfig, route) should be able to build, provided the needed
> patches are available.

Well I think big source package(s) is/are preferable to multiple source 
packages. That will ease the maintainance of such packages, that would 
remove some redundancies (build scripts of multiple source packages 
would be very similar), and also would ease the future inclusion of the 
packages in unstable (less packages that will have to be accepted by the 
ftpmaster).

On another side, a too big source package will be difficult to maintain. 
What about make one source package by category. For example:

freebsd-netutils: pf, ifconfig, netstat, route, ...
freebsd-hwutils: atacontrol, kbdcontrol, disklabel, ...
freebsd-kernelutils: kldutils, ktrace, mdconfig, dmesg, sysctl, ...

The exact names and the contents of the differents binaries packages 
could vary, but here is the idea.

What do you think of that?

Bye,
Aurelien

-- 
   .''`.  Aurelien Jarno	            | GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73
  : :' :  Debian GNU/Linux developer | Electrical Engineer
  `. `'   aurel32 at debian.org         | aurelien at aurel32.net
    `-    people.debian.org/~aurel32 | www.aurel32.net