From Newsgroup: muc.lists.freebsd.ports

It just dawned on me that tier-2 platforms don't get pkg support,
which makes the instructions for bootstrapping ports at https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/ports/#ports-using
somewhat difficult to use.

Can a preliminary ports tree be obtained via some other means?
One could do a recursive sftp from another local system,
am I missing something obvious?

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska



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From Newsgroup: muc.lists.freebsd.ports

On Fri, 13 Mar 2026 09:56:04 -0700
bob prohaska <fbsd@www.zefox.net> wrote:

It just dawned on me that tier-2 platforms don't get pkg support,
which makes the instructions for bootstrapping ports at https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/ports/#ports-using
somewhat difficult to use.

Can a preliminary ports tree be obtained via some other means?
One could do a recursive sftp from another local system,
am I missing something obvious?

I often use /usr/ports mounted via nfs. Works quite well when both
server and client are connected via LAN. Doing that across internet
over slower links is not the best, but you could, probably, do 'cp -R'
of something similar even in this case.

Regards,
Milan


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From Newsgroup: muc.lists.freebsd.ports

On 3/13/26 09:56, bob prohaska wrote:

It just dawned on me that tier-2 platforms don't get pkg support,
which makes the instructions for bootstrapping ports at https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/ports/#ports-using
somewhat difficult to use.

Can a preliminary ports tree be obtained via some other means?
One could do a recursive sftp from another local system,
am I missing something obvious?

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska

One could imagine having the following populated and kept appropriately
up to date separately from any potential official port-tree builds:

https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:1[3456]:armv7/latest/Latest/pkg*.pkg* https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:1[3456]:riscv64/latest/Latest/pkg*.pkg*

(Is more required for FreeBSD's not-port-based pkg to bootstrap to such
that is port based?)

They would have to track the oldest supported minor version of the major FreeBSD version.


As stands, for armv7:

https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:1[345]:armv7/latest/Latest/pkg*.pkg*

have builds from back in 2025 Sep./Oct that are from before the official
armv7 port-package builds were stopped. They are not being kept up to
date with the port-based pkg releases. But, for all I know, the vintages present might still be appropriate for use.

Only FreeBSD 16's:

https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:16:armv7/latest/Latest/pkg*.pkg*

has no matching files of any vintage. (It does not have latest/ at all.)


But I'm not sure that having port-based pkg's available to boot strap to
this way (or analogous) would be reasonable overall, including the issue
of keeping them appropriately up to date (whatever the details would be).
--
===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com


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From Newsgroup: muc.lists.freebsd.ports

On Fri, Mar 13, 2026 at 10:32:30AM -0700, Mark Millard wrote:

One could imagine having the following populated and kept appropriately
up to date separately from any potential official port-tree builds:

https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:1[3456]:armv7/latest/Latest/pkg*.pkg* https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:1[3456]:riscv64/latest/Latest/pkg*.pkg*

(Is more required for FreeBSD's not-port-based pkg to bootstrap to such
that is port based?)

They would have to track the oldest supported minor version of the major FreeBSD version.

As stands, for armv7:

https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:1[345]:armv7/latest/Latest/pkg*.pkg*

have builds from back in 2025 Sep./Oct that are from before the official armv7 port-package builds were stopped. They are not being kept up to
date with the port-based pkg releases. But, for all I know, the vintages present might still be appropriate for use.

Only FreeBSD 16's:

https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:16:armv7/latest/Latest/pkg*.pkg*

has no matching files of any vintage. (It does not have latest/ at all.)

But I'm not sure that having port-based pkg's available to boot strap to
this way (or analogous) would be reasonable overall, including the issue
of keeping them appropriately up to date (whatever the details would be).

I was thinking to ftp only an initial /usr/ports tree, use make in
that tree to compile git and then use git to keep /usr/ports updated.
One could then build local versions of poudriere and git, with pkg
updating from /usr/src.

What could possibly go wrong? 8-) Eventually, FreeBSSD will drift
away from supporting old tier-2 platforms, but that's inevitable.

Thanks for writing,

bob prohaska



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From Newsgroup: muc.lists.freebsd.ports

Hello!

On 3/13/26 12:10PM, bob prohaska wrote:

On Fri, Mar 13, 2026 at 10:32:30AM -0700, Mark Millard wrote:

One could imagine having the following populated and kept appropriately
up to date separately from any potential official port-tree builds:


https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:1[3456]:armv7/latest/Latest/pkg*.pkg*
https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:1[3456]:riscv64/latest/Latest/pkg*.pkg*

(Is more required for FreeBSD's not-port-based pkg to bootstrap to such
that is port based?)

They would have to track the oldest supported minor version of the major
FreeBSD version.


As stands, for armv7:

https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:1[345]:armv7/latest/Latest/pkg*.pkg*

have builds from back in 2025 Sep./Oct that are from before the official
armv7 port-package builds were stopped. They are not being kept up to
date with the port-based pkg releases. But, for all I know, the vintages
present might still be appropriate for use.

Only FreeBSD 16's:

https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:16:armv7/latest/Latest/pkg*.pkg*

has no matching files of any vintage. (It does not have latest/ at all.)


But I'm not sure that having port-based pkg's available to boot strap to
this way (or analogous) would be reasonable overall, including the issue
of keeping them appropriately up to date (whatever the details would be).

I was thinking to ftp only an initial /usr/ports tree, use make in
that tree to compile git and then use git to keep /usr/ports updated.
One could then build local versions of poudriere and git, with pkg
updating from /usr/src.

What could possibly go wrong? 8-) Eventually, FreeBSSD will drift
away from supporting old tier-2 platforms, but that's inevitable.

Or, you could use the one system with Poudriere to build whatever
packages you require throughout the network of the tiers to host a
"local" package repository from that same system to all the others. One Poudriere to rule them all. This is one of the major strengths of
Poudriere for custom packages on filtered ecosystems.

Obviously, I may have interpreted all of this completely wrong. If so, I apologize.

Regards,
Janky Jay, III



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From Newsgroup: muc.lists.freebsd.ports

On Fri, 13 Mar 2026 09:56:04 -0700
bob prohaska <fbsd@www.zefox.net> wrote:

It just dawned on me that tier-2 platforms don't get pkg support,
which makes the instructions for bootstrapping ports at https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/ports/#ports-using
somewhat difficult to use.

Can a preliminary ports tree be obtained via some other means?
One could do a recursive sftp from another local system,
am I missing something obvious?

You can get the ports tarball as part of a release, ie: https://download.freebsd.org/releases/amd64/14.4-RELEASE/ports.txz

I believe it may even be part of some installation media like DVDs, but
I have not checked this.
--
Piotr Smyrak


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From Newsgroup: muc.lists.freebsd.ports


--x5mfJIz/H0JvUJuK
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On 2026-Mar-13 09:56:04 -0700, bob prohaska <fbsd@www.zefox.net> wrote:

It just dawned on me that tier-2 platforms don't get pkg support,
which makes the instructions for bootstrapping ports at >https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/ports/#ports-using
somewhat difficult to use.

Can a preliminary ports tree be obtained via some other means?
One could do a recursive sftp from another local system,=20
am I missing something obvious?

In summary:
* pkg isn't supported on tier-2 platforms
* git is unusable on resource-constrained systems
* there aren't supported alternatives to git for either ports or src.

For local systems, I just use NFS.

For remote systems, my solution was to setup rsyncd offering read-only
access to /usr/ports (less the distfiles and packages directories) as
well as the various src trees that I run, inside WireGuard tunnels.
The remote systems then rsync the trees they want.

--=20
Peter Jeremy

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From Newsgroup: muc.lists.freebsd.ports

On 3/13/26 09:56, bob prohaska wrote:

It just dawned on me that tier-2 platforms don't get pkg support,
which makes the instructions for bootstrapping ports at https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/ports/#ports-using
somewhat difficult to use.

I will note that the only instance of the word "tier" in the whole
handbook is in: "ftp14.FreeBSD.org ftp rsync (Former official tier 1)"

That is not about FreeBSD OS levels of support of platforms at all.

Do not expect the handbook to give instructions for when tier 2 is not
like tier 1 for how to do things. It seems to be mostly about tier 1
contexts when there are such distinctions that would need to be made
--and is implicitly so instead of being explicit about it.

In fact, it still has sections that only mention i386 and amd64 as alternatives. Quick approximate counts of references overall: amd64 is mentioned 83 times, x86_64 18 times, x86 3 times with 64 bit also
mentioned. aarch64 is mentioned 6 times, arm64 4 times, and armv8 1
time. risc-v is mentioned 3 times. (Sometimes ARM means 32-bit in the
document and other times it is used as generic for both sizes and yet
other times it is part of a different word, and so so, making
partitioning the 22 text matches more than I want to do here.)

Can a preliminary ports tree be obtained via some other means?

https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports/archive/refs/heads/main.zip https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports/archive/refs/heads/2026Q1.zip

One could do a recursive sftp from another local system,
am I missing something obvious?

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska

--
===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com


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From Newsgroup: muc.lists.freebsd.ports

On 3/13/26 09:56, bob prohaska wrote:

It just dawned on me that tier-2 platforms don't get pkg support,

I just noticed that despite the following appearing to be populated with
old port-package builds:

https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:15:armv7/latest/

https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:14:armv7/latest/ https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:14:armv7/quarterly/

https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:13:armv7/latest/ https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:13:armv7/quarterly/

it turns out that:

https://people.freebsd.org/~dbaio/pkg-master-report.html

no longer shows such older " latest " or " quarterly " port-package
builds at all (no _ in those Set names). The oldest " latest " timestamp
(UTC) shown is: 2026-03-01 13:09:46Z . " quarterly ": 2026-02-26
00:40:45Z . The old armv7 builds go back to the likes of 2025-Sep./Oct.

What shows (so: having modern port-package builds):

latest:
freebsd:1[3456]:x86:64 a.k.a amd64 for 13.5, 14.3, 15.0 and main (16) freebsd:1[3456]:aarch64:64 a.k.a. aarch64 for the same
freebsd:1[34]:x86:32 a.k.a. i386 for 13.5 and 14.3

quarterly:
freebsd:1[345]:x86:64 a.k.a amd64 for 13.5, 14.3, 15.0 and main (16) freebsd:1[345]:aarch64:64 a.k.a. aarch64 for the same
freebsd:1[34]:x86:32 a.k.a. i386 for 13.5 and 14.3

which makes the instructions for bootstrapping ports at https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/ports/#ports-using
somewhat difficult to use.

Can a preliminary ports tree be obtained via some other means?
One could do a recursive sftp from another local system,
am I missing something obvious?

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska

--
===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com


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