Cleaning and Customizing Your FreeBSD Ports

BSD Forums writes "One of FreeBSD's biggest benefits is its ports collection. It seems like magic, but a little maintenance can make it work even better for your system. Dru Lavigne explains how to keep your ports collection clean and how to customize individual ports."

portsclean

[Dukebytes]

Good article on this. I checked and had a pile of stuff in dist files....

That portsclean -DC works really well! Very through, updated the database and cleaned out a bunch of stuff. It seems like everything that the BSD people do is very stable and does exactly what they say it will do.

I really don't understand why the BSD's don't get more involvement... Maybe I just haven't been invited into that L33t crowd - yet...
Duke

Re:portsclean

[Brandybuck]

Maybe I just haven't been invited into that L33t crowd - yet...

You waiting for an invitation? Hey, this isn't Linux, you don't need one! Just come on.

Re:portsclean

[Z4rd0Z]

My method has always been
# find /usr/ports -type d -name work |xargs rm -rf
# cd /usr/ports/distfiles
# rm everything except_big_stuff_like_X

Also a disk space saver is...

[horcy]

... cd /usr/ports/distfiles then rm -rf *

Re:What I Know About *BSD

[Z4rd0Z]

1. You can not play games on it.
BSD is for work, NOT PLAY.

2. It cannot be used by my grandma.
Because your grandma is farting dust six feet under.

3. It lacks a GUI of any note.
Real Men don't use GUIs.

4. There is no support available for it.
Again, Real Men don't need support.

5. It is an assortment of fragmented OSes.
Um, this article is about BSD, not Linux. Learn to read.

6. It cannot be run on the x86 platform.
Everyone on Slashdot knows x86 is dead, where have you been?.

7. You ha

Re:What I Know About *BSD

[__aafkqj3628]

You can not play games on it.
Is Quake 3 [freebsd.org] not good enough for you?

It cannot be used by my grandma.
Grandma can't use a toaster, what's your point?

It lacks a GUI of any note.
*looks over to freebsd box and sees KDE running*

There is no support available for it.
No support for wimps.

It is an assortment of fragmented OSes.
You must have it confused with Red Hat. The colours are similar and those might confuse you.

It cannot be run on the x86 platform.
*looks at Cyrix 6x86 PR-200 for the second time toda

Nice

[__aafkqj3628]

Good article there, now I can finally remove all of the crap from my file server that I don't need (good timing too since I just got it up).

Now, if I can only work out why sendmail (or at least the mailqueue) still insists on running *sigh*

Re:Nice

[atrus]

You need to set sendmail_enable to NONE, not NO. NO simply disables the actual port 25 server, but not the mail queue.

Re:Nice

[__aafkqj3628]

Thanks, but WTF?!? Am I asking too much for a list of these options somewhere (or am I totally bind to have missed it?) or it a few dives through the source-code for me?

Re:Nice

[atrus]

There was a big controversy on freebsd-stable awhile back on the evilness of the tri-state option. I think its an ugly fix, but nothing else seemed any prettier.

You can always check /etc/defaults/rc.conf. I believe it is noted in there.

Re:Nice

[__aafkqj3628]

What about having two -
SENDMAIL_ENABLE
SENDMAIL_INBOUND_ENABLE
?

It is noted in there, was it not good enough for the doc guys?

It's times like these, where I sliently swear that I'll fix it some day.

Re:Nice

[frankmanowar]

It's in the freebsd handbook, in the sendmail section. it tells you to set sendmail_enable to none if you want to turn it off completely, or no if you want to just disable the daemon, but still wish to be able to send outgoing mail... you can find most basic stuff listed in the freebsd handbook, you really should be using it a lot in the beginning!

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/h andbook/mail-changingmta.html [freebsd.org]

-Frank

Re:Nice

[__aafkqj3628]

I know, but I'm not going to read through the whole thing before I get started (I usually want to use the system to find out how to use and configure it).
But I guess I can't have everything (but grouped configuration settings should maybe in in an appendix somewhere?)