Contents

Questions & Answers

How can I get a list of all ?make variables that are used by pkgsrc?

That's difficult. But you can get a very good approximation by changing to a package directory and running the following command:

make -dv show-var VARNAME=VARNAME \
| sed -n 's,^Global:\([^ ]*\) =.*,\1,p' \
| sed 's,\..*,.*,' \
| sort -u \
| grep ^\[A-Z\] \
| less

Another possibility is to run bmake show-all. This will list many (but not all) variables.

If you need more information about a specific variable, run bmake help topic=VARNAME or have a look at pkglint's variable definition file

When patching a GNU-style configure script, where should I add changes?

If you want your changes to override everything else, then look for "ac_config_files=" and put it somewhere before that line.

I'm going to make incompatible changes to pkgsrc. Where should I document it?

In the file doc/CHANGES-*.

What's the difference between ${TEST}, test and [?

There is practically no difference. All the standard options are supported on all platforms. See also ?The pkgsrc portability guide.

See also

• http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/pkgsrc/devfaq.html