Getting more accurate results…

FreshPorts has always strived to be correct. Even when it’s difficult. One issue which always always proven difficult is ports that rely upon other ports. or cannot be installed with other ports. Case in point, sysutils/msktutil, which includes this message: IGNORE: cannot install: SASL support requested and openldap-client-2.4.20 is installed

That’s not really appropriate on FreshPorts. You may not have openldap-client, but the production FreshPorts web server has it installed. Removing it is not an option. I need certain ports to run the server. In fact, there are 465 ports installed on that server.

But zi has an evil cunning plan. He came up with after talking to me about sysutils/msktutil. Use chroot.

I like it. I like it because it’s simple.

Demonstration of the problem

$ cd /usr/ports/sysutils/msktutil
$ /usr/bin/make -V PORTNAME -V PKGNAME -V IGNORE  -V -f /usr/ports/sysutils/msktutil/Makefile  
msktutil
msktutil-0.4.1
cannot install: SASL support requested and openldap-client-2.4.20 is installed

$

Ideally, we don’t get that IGNORE.

The solution

The solution, do this all in an environment which does not contain ports.

Let me outline it. First, you create a bunch of directories which will mimic a port environment. Like this:

mkdir -p /ports-jail/usr/ports    \
         /ports-jail/usr/share/mk \
         /ports-jail/usr/sbin     \
         /ports-jail/usr/bin      \
         /ports-jail/libexec      \
         /ports-jail/usr/lib      \
         /ports-jail/sbin         \
         /ports-jail/lib          \
         /ports-jail/bin          \
         /ports-jail/dev

Then, create mountpoints which mimic a real box. The following entries are added /etc/fstab:

/usr/ports                      /ports-jail/usr/ports                           nullfs  ro,nosuid,noexec        0       0
/usr/share/mk                   /ports-jail/usr/share/mk                        nullfs  ro,nosuid,noexec        0       0
/usr/sbin                       /ports-jail/usr/sbin                            nullfs  ro,nosuid               0       0
/usr/bin                        /ports-jail/usr/bin                             nullfs  ro,nosuid               0       0
/libexec                        /ports-jail/libexec                             nullfs  ro,nosuid               0       0
/usr/lib                        /ports-jail/usr/lib                             nullfs  ro,nosuid               0       0
/sbin                           /ports-jail/sbin                                nullfs  ro,nosuid               0       0
/lib                            /ports-jail/lib                                 nullfs  ro,nosuid               0       0
/bin                            /ports-jail/bin                                 nullfs  ro,nosuid               0       0
none                            /ports-jail/dev                                 devfs   rw                      0       0

Once you have that, mount them:

$ sudo mount -a

Now we need a little script and we’ll put it at /ports-jail/make.sh:

#!/bin/sh
PORTDIR=$1
cd ${PORTDIR}
/usr/bin/make -V PORTNAME -V PKGNAME -V IGNORE  -V -f /usr/ports/${PORTDIR}/Makefile  LOCALBASE=/nonexistentlocal

Then you can issue this command:

$ sudo /usr/sbin/chroot -u dan /ports-jail /make.sh /usr/ports/sysutils/msktutil
msktutil
msktutil-0.4.1


$

You’ll see that IGNORE is now empty. A very good start.

NOTE: The reason we mount /ports-jail/dev like that is to avoid this error:

$ sudo /usr/sbin/chroot -u dan /ports-jail /make.sh /usr/ports/sysutils/msktutil
cannot create /dev/null: No such file or directory
msktutil
msktutil-0.4.1


$

So far so good. This seems like a good proof of concept. :)