Today I noticed a problem with my development machine. It has been in storage for about a month. Yesterday it started processing FreshPorts emails again. Overnight, I noticed a strange error which I could not follow:
Unusual System Events
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Dec 31 20:33:11 ngaio FreshPorts[93781]: error executing make command for sysutils/rsyslog-mysql: This command (FreshPorts code […]

Back in August, I wrote about patching the ports tree to cater for master/slave relationships. I am happy to report that this patch is no longer required. Instead of MASTERPORT, as provided by that patch, I can use MASTER_PORT, which is now part of the stock ports/Mk/bsd.port.mk.
\o/
No more patching.

At present, master/slave relationships in FreshPorts are not stored optimally. Each port has a field, master_port, which contains the category/port of its master_port, otherwise, it is an empty string.
The ideal situation would be a table such as this:

create table master_slave
(
master_port_id integer […]

MASTERPORT is a tool Mark Linimon and I have used for a while. It seems to have entered into common usage now.

freshports.org=# select master_port, category, name from ports_active
where master_port like ‘/%’ order by category, name;
[…]

As reported by sem@, there is a problem with the display of master/slave relationships within FreshPorts. The relationship is stored in the ports table, with the master_port attribute being a pointer to the master port. This text field typically has values such as this:
freshports.org=# SELECT DISTINCT(master_port)
freshports.org-# FROM […]

Caching to disk, at least for ports, is now implemented. I didn’t plan to moved a new feature into production on the day before I leave for a conference, but it happened.
If you notice that the website has not been updated after a port has been committed, please let me know. That […]

A user recently asked if we could show the size of the port/package. Getting the size of the distfiles is relatively easy. It’s in the distinfo file. For slave ports, we already know the master port, so we get the information from there.
It might also be nice to show the size of […]