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Introduction

On Mac OS X, you either compile programs by yourself, or you use MacPorts or Fink.

If you only have the need to compile a few basic things then maybe you’re fine, but with some packages things pretty much get messy quickly as you have to hunt around for dependencies and stuff.

So, there is one option that isn’t quite popular as the previous two mentioned. It’s called pkgsrc and it is quite nice—actually, I am using it with great success.

NetBSD is known as the highly portable operating system and pkgsrc is no exception.

Given that this is OS X, we will pay special attention to install pkgsrc in an isolated environment that OS X will never ever touch.

pkgsrc requires case-sensitive file system and OS X by default uses HFS+ which is case-insensitive. We will use a sparse disk image and therefore get rid of the limitations while also gaining much benefits.

IMHO, this is the most portable, cleanest and best way to use the pkgsrc on Mac OS X. When you unmount the disk image, there is no single trace of pkgsrc on the system except the symlinks and the PATH variable.

You can even put it on the flash disk and use it on various computers! When it’s unmounted, Mac OS X doesn’t care. And when it’s mounted you instantly have all your tools at your disposal. Pretty neat.

Prerequisites

First things first, you will need Apple Developers Tools installed.

Setup

Edit your .bash_profile/.bash_login/.bashrc or whatever you use to include this:

export CVSROOT=anoncvs@anoncvs3.de.netbsd.org:/cvsroot
export CVS_RSH=ssh
export PATH=/usr/pkg/bin:/usr/pkg/sbin:$PATH
export MANPATH=/usr/pkg/man:$MANPATH

And .cvsrc:

# recommended CVS configuration file from the pkgsrc guide
checkout -P
update -dP
release -d
diff -upN
cvs -q -z3
rdiff -u

Apply the changes made to profile

. ~/.bash_profile

Create the sparse disk image

# hdiutil create -fs HFSX -fsargs "-c c=64,a=16,e=16 -s" -volname pkgsrc -type SPARSE -stretch SizeOfYourDisk -size SizeOfYourDisk -ov /SomewhereOnYourDisk/pkgsrc

Mount it

Mount the image by double clicking it in the Finder.

Create some folders in it

# cd /Volumes/pkgsrc
# mkdir pkg pkgsrc pkgdb

Create symlinks

# sudo ln -s /Volumes/pkgsrc/pkg /usr/pkg
# sudo ln -s /Volumes/pkgsrc/pkgsrc /usr/pkgsrc
# sudo ln -s /Volumes/pkgsrc/pkgdb /var/db/pkg

Checking out the tree

We will now checkout the pkgsrc:

# cd /usr
# cvs -q co -P pkgsrc

Bootstrap

# cd pkgsrc/bootstrap
# sudo ./bootstrap

Install new package

To actually install something from the pkgsrc package collection, do the following:

# cd /usr/pkgsrc/misc/figlet
#bmake install clean clean-depends

Misc Info

Compact the disk image

You can later optimize the disk image to use less space by issuing the following command (you must first unmount the disk image):

# hdiutil compact /SomewhereOnYourDisk/pkgsrc.sparseimage

CVS mirrors

You can use any of the NetBSD AnonCVS mirrors listed here: http://www.netbsd.org/mirrors/#anoncvs.
To use the French mirror instead, you could export the following variable:

# export CVSROOT=anoncvs@anoncvs.fr.NetBSD.org:/pub/NetBSD-CVS

wget

To use for example wget instead of ftp when installing packages, first you need to install it like before by going to net/wget folder and issuing the make commands and then modifying the /usr/pkg/etc/mk.conf file to include the following before the last line:

FETCH_CMD=             wget
FETCH_BEFORE_ARGS=     --passive-ftp
FETCH_RESUME_ARGS=     -c
FETCH_OUTPUT_ARGS=     -O

bmake

This is important: You must use the bmake command instead of make on Mac OS X when installing packages.

Vulnerabilities

To download the vulnerability list, run the following:

# download-vulnerability-list

Cleaning the build directories

If you sometimes forget to clean or simply need the build directories, you can delete them later like this:

# find /usr/pkgsrc -name work -exec rm -r {} \;

Or install the pkgclean package

Links

The original aricle
The pkgsrc guide

Cheers,
Marcin

nmt said ...

<comment date="2012-11-26T02:43:15Z" name="nmt"> If you download Xcode 4.3 or later, the command line tools are not available by default. See https:developer.apple.com/support/xcode/ for details on how to download the command line tools. </comment>