New categories arise from time to time. The descriptions for all categories are held in www/en/ports/categories. There are two situations when FreshPorts needs to fetch this file from CVS:

When a new port is created.
When www/en/ports/categories is updated.

I have case #2 coded. Case #1 is not as easy to do. In case #2, […]

The tk category now has a member!
This category was added to www/en/ports/categories about six months ago.
It was this commit that did it.
The previously reported problem with virtual categories repeated in production. That is to be expected. The proposed solution exists only on my private dev server at home. Regretably, the solution has […]

Late last night, I wrote about a problem with virtual categories. I’ve been unable to reproduce the problem in test. But I did find the problem in production.

[dan@supernews:/usr/websites/freshports.org/scripts] $ touch ../dynamic/www.en.ports.categories
[dan@supernews:/usr/websites/freshports.org/scripts] $ sh process_www_en_ports_categories.sh
about to fetch: fetch -q -o /usr/websites/freshports.org/dynamic/caching/tmp/categories http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/www/en/ports/categories?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/plain
Can’t locate Text/CSV_XS.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.8/BSDPAN /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/mach /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.8/mach /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.8 […]

After all I’ve written about virtual categories, it seems I still don’t have them right.
The code is there:

$ grep -l www/en/ports/categories *
process_www_en_ports_categories.sh
special_processing_files.pm

but things are still not being updated. If you look at the list of categories, sort by Description, you will find several with a description of “This is a virtual category. No description […]

Yesterday I wrote about the script that will update category descriptions. Today I’ll show the script that will invoke that script.
This script will fetch the file via cvsweb,
config.sh contains all the setting particular to this installation.
This code is now in beta and will move to production after it’s been invoked at least once.

#!/bin/sh

if […]

This is all Pav’s fault. The conversation went something like this (other conversations trimmed):
[15:32] <Pav> dvl: around?
[15:39] <dvl> Pav: here!
[15:41] <dvl> .ping Pav
[15:41] <dvl> ping Pav
[15:41] *** ¢ PING sent to Pav
[15:41] *** ¢ PING reply of 3.25 s from Pav
[15:41] <dvl> third time works
[15:42] <laemodost> Ping timeout.
[15:43] <dvl> yueah
[15:49] <Pav> dvl: hey hey.. […]

On FreshPorts, virtual categories have no description.
What are virtual cagtegories? Those categories that do not have a corresponding subdirectory in the ports tree. They are only used as secondary categories, and only for search purposes.
FreshPorts can easily detect the creation of a new category, be it virtual or real (non-virtual). FreshPorts can grab the […]

Virtual categories are nice, but they are hard to deal with. For starters, there is no simple place to get the description for a virtual category. For a physical category, you can do this:
[dan@polo:~/ports/sysutils] $ make -V COMMENT
System utilities
[dan@polo:~/ports/sysutils] $ grep “System utilities” *
Makefile: COMMENT = System utilities
[dan@polo:~/ports/sysutils] $
But for a […]