Get the original sources (normally) as a compressed tarball (foo.tar.gz or foo.tar.bz2) and copy it into DISTDIR. Always use mainstream sources when and where possible.

Set the variable MASTER_SITES to reflect where the original tarball resides. Shorthand definitions exist for most mainstream sites in bsd.sites.mk. Please use these sites—and the associated definitions—if at all possible, to help avoid the problem of having the same information repeated over again many times in the source base. As these sites tend to change over time, this becomes a maintenance nightmare for everyone involved. See Section 5.4.2, “MASTER_SITES” for details.

If there is no FTP/HTTP site that is well-connected to the net, or can only find sites that have irritatingly non-standard formats, put a copy on a reliable FTP or HTTP server (for example, a home page).

If a convenient and reliable place to put the distfile cannot be found, we can “house” it ourselves on ftp.FreeBSD.org; however, this is the least-preferred solution. The distfile must be placed into ~/public_distfiles/ of someone's freefall account. Ask the person who commits the port to do this. This person will also set MASTER_SITES to LOCAL/username where username is their FreeBSD cluster login.

If the port's distfile changes all the time without any kind of version update by the author, consider putting the distfile on a home page and listing it as the first MASTER_SITES. Try to talk the port author out of doing this; it really does help to establish some kind of source code control. Hosting a specific version will prevent users from getting checksum mismatch errors, and also reduce the workload of maintainers of our FTP site. Also, if there is only one master site for the port, it is recommended to house a backup on a home page and list it as the second MASTER_SITES.

If the port requires additional patches that are available on the Internet, fetch them too and put them in DISTDIR. Do not worry if they come from a site other than where the main source tarball comes, we have a way to handle these situations (see the description of PATCHFILES below).