May 2nd, 2007
A little thing
Sometimes we learn a bit only after a lot of studying… but after such a commitment, that little thing can make us happy as if we discovered a new world!
Yesterday I finally understood the way to have the pkg_add utility grabbing the binary packages from a source other than the default for the system’s version release. It resulted to be a great saving of time in the process of installing a lot of useful piece of software from the FreeBSD ports collection, thereby preventing to waste your patience by searching, downloading and installing each latest revision of dependent/depending packages you need.
It was only necessary to set the PACKAGESITE environment variable to drive the behavior of this utility, by specifying in the value the full path to the version branch of the ports collection maintained by the FreeBSD technical staff. So, if you wish to install the latest revision of all software packages built for the 6.2-RELEASE, even if you are using the 6.1-RELEASE, you only need to issue this command in you shell: “setenv PACKAGESITE ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-6.2-release/Latest/“.