4.7.5. The pkg Subdirectory

There are some tricks we haven't mentioned yet about the pkg subdirectory that come in handy sometimes.

4.7.5.1. MESSAGE

If you need to display a message to the installer, you may place the message in pkg/MESSAGE. This capability is often useful to display additional installation steps to be taken after a pkg_add, or to display licensing information. Note the pkg/MESSAGE file does not need to be added to pkg/PLIST. Also, it will not get automatically printed if the user is using the port, not the package, so you should probably display it from the post-install target by yourself.

4.7.5.2. INSTALL

If your port needs to execute commands when the binary package is installed with pkg_add you can do this via the pkg/INSTALL script. This script will automatically be added to the package, and will be run twice by pkg_add. The first time will as `INSTALL ${PKGNAME} PRE-INSTALL' and the second time as `INSTALL ${PKGNAME} POST-INSTALL'. `$2' can be tested to determine which mode the script is being run in. The `PKG_PREFIX' environmental variable will be set to the package installation directory. See man pkg_add(1) for additional information. Note, that this script is not run automatically if you install the port with `make install'. If you are depending on it being run, you will have to explicitly call it from your port's Makefile.

4.7.5.3. REQ

If your port needs to determine if it should install or not, you can create a pkg/REQ ``requirements'' script. It will be invoked automatically at installation/deinstallation time to determine whether or not installation/deinstallation should proceed.

4.7.5.4. Changing PLIST based on make variables

Some ports, particularly the p5- ports, need to change their PLIST depending on what options they are configured with (or version of perl, in the case of p5- ports). To make this easy, any instances in the PLIST of %%OSREL%%, %%PERL_VER%%, and %%PERL_VERSION%% will be substituted for appropriately. The value of %%OSREL%% is the numeric revision of the operating system (e.g., `2.2.7'). %%PERL_VERSION%% is the full version number of perl (e.g., `5.00502') and %%PERL_VER%% is the perl version number minus the patchlevel (e.g., `5.005').

If you need to make other substitutions, you can set the PLIST_SUB variable with a list of VAR=VALUE pairs and instances of `%%VAR%%' will be substituted with `VALUE' in the PLIST. For instance, if you have a port that installs many files in a version-specific subdirectory, you can put something like

OCTAVE_VERSION=	2.0.13
PLIST_SUB=	OCTAVE_VERSION=${OCTAVE_VERSION}

in the Makefile and use %%OCTAVE_VERSION%% wherever the version shows up in PLIST. That way, when you upgrade the port, you will not have to change dozens (or in some cases, hundreds) of lines in the PLIST.

This substitution (as well as addition of any man pages) will be done between the do-install and post-install targets, by reading from ${PLIST} and writing to ${TMPPLIST} (default: ${WRKDIR}/.PLIST.mktmp). So if your port builds ${PLIST} on the fly, do so in or before do-install. Also, if your port needs to edit the resulting file, do so in post-install to a file named ${TMPPLIST}.

4.7.5.5. Changing the names of files in the pkg subdirectory

All the filenames in the pkg subdirectory are defined using variables so you can change them in your Makefile if need be. This is especially useful when you are sharing the same pkg subdirectory among several ports or have to write to one of the above files (see writing to places other than WRKDIR for why it is a bad idea to write directly into the pkg subdirectory).

Here is a list of variable names and their default values.

COMMENT          ${PKGDIR}/COMMENT
DESCR            ${PKGDIR}/DESCR
PLIST            ${PKGDIR}/PLIST
PKGINSTALL       ${PKGDIR}/INSTALL
PKGDEINSTALL     ${PKGDIR}/DEINSTALL
PKGREQ           ${PKGDIR}/REQ
PKGMESSAGE       ${PKGDIR}/MESSAGE

Please change these variables rather than overriding PKG_ARGS. If you change PKG_ARGS, those files will not correctly be installed in /var/db/pkg upon install from a port.