Chapter 8. Advanced pkg-plist Practices

Some ports, particularly the p5- ports, need to change their pkg-plist depending on what options they are configured with (or version of perl, in the case of p5- ports). To make this easy, any instances in pkg-plist of %%OSREL%%, %%PERL_VER%%, and %%PERL_VERSION%% will be substituted appropriately. The value of %%OSREL%% is the numeric revision of the operating system (for example, 4.9). %%PERL_VERSION%% and %%PERL_VER%% is the full version number of perl (for example, 5.8.9). Several other %%VARS%% related to port's documentation files are described in the relevant section.

To make other substitutions, set PLIST_SUB with a list of VAR=VALUE pairs and instances of %%VAR%% will be substituted with VALUE in pkg-plist.

For instance, if a port installs many files in a version-specific subdirectory, use a placeholder for the version so that pkg-plist does not have to be regenerated every time the port is updated. For example:

OCTAVE_VERSION=	${PORTREVISION}
PLIST_SUB=	OCTAVE_VERSION=${OCTAVE_VERSION}

in the Makefile and use %%OCTAVE_VERSION%% wherever the version shows up in pkg-plist. When the port is upgraded, it will not be necessary to edit dozens (or in some cases, hundreds) of lines in pkg-plist.

If files are installed conditionally on the options set in the port, the usual way of handling it is prefixing pkg-plist lines with a %%OPT%% for lines needed when the option is enabled, or %%NO_OPT%% when the option is disabled, and adding OPTIONS_SUB=yes to the Makefile. See Section 5.13.3.1, “OPTIONS_SUB” for more information.

For instance, if there are files that are only installed when the X11 option is enabled, and Makefile has:

OPTIONS_DEFINE=	X11
OPTIONS_SUB=	yes

In pkg-plist, put %%X11%% in front of the lines only being installed when the option is enabled, like this :

%%X11%%bin/foo-gui

This substitution will be done between the pre-install and do-install targets, by reading from PLIST and writing to TMPPLIST (default: WRKDIR/.PLIST.mktmp). So if the port builds PLIST on the fly, do so in or before pre-install. Also, if the port needs to edit the resulting file, do so in post-install to a file named TMPPLIST.

Another way of modifying a port's packing list is based on setting the variables PLIST_FILES and PLIST_DIRS. The value of each variable is regarded as a list of pathnames to write to TMPPLIST along with PLIST contents. While names listed in PLIST_FILES and PLIST_DIRS are subject to %%VAR%% substitution as described above, it is better to use the ${VAR} directly. Except for that, names from PLIST_FILES will appear in the final packing list unchanged, while @dir will be prepended to names from PLIST_DIRS. To take effect, PLIST_FILES and PLIST_DIRS must be set before TMPPLIST is written, that is, in pre-install or earlier.

From time to time, using OPTIONS_SUB is not enough. In those cases, adding a specific TAG to PLIST_SUB inside the Makefile with a special value of @comment, makes package tools to ignore the line. For instance, if some files are only installed when the X11 option is on and the architecture is i386:

.include <bsd.port.pre.mk>

.if ${PORT_OPTIONS:MX11} && ${ARCH} == "i386"
PLIST_SUB+=	X11I386=""
.else
PLIST_SUB+=	X11I386="@comment "
.endif