4.5. What to do when a port does not work.

Oh. You can do one of four (4) things :

1. Fix it yourself. Technical details on how ports work can be found in Porting applications.
2. Gripe. This is done by e-mail *ONLY*! Send such e-mail to the FreeBSD ports mailing list <freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG> and please include the name/version of the port, where you got both the port source & distfile(s) from, and what the text of the error was.
3. Forget it. This is the easiest for most - very few of the programs in ports can be classified as `essential'!
4. Grab the pre-compiled package from a ftp server. The ``master'' package collection is on FreeBSD's FTP server in the packages directory, though check your local mirror first, please! These are more likely to work (on the whole) than trying to compile from source and a lot faster besides! Use the pkg_add(1) program to install a package file on your system.