DPorts – DragonFly BSD Digest

2026/04/30

A DPorts explanation

The DragonFly site has a recently-updated page describing how DPorts is assembled and the process to contribute.

It does need the criterion for when it’s ready to release – either a number of working ports, or certain key ports buildable, or a combination of the two. Something like “Chrome, Apache, nginx, MariaDB, Postgres, and X11 build, and over 75% of packages in general are successful, with less than a 10% decrease in buildable packages from the last dports release”. I just made that up, so it’s not an actual threshold. But it could be?

2025/07/162025/07/15

certctl(8) not needed

I missed this some time ago, but: you may see errors about certctl(8) when upgrading your packages. It’s not necessary, yet.

2024/01/182024/01/17

Automatic package builds for releases

The DragonFly release process now includes an automatic build of supporting packages.

2023/11/302023/11/23

dsynth in DragonFly

Elements of dsynth, the mass package builder for DragonFly, are now appearing in the base system. It looks like this is most helpful for building packages as part of the base install, but there might be other applications.

2022/12/27

2022Q4 dports

Updating to the most recent dports binaries has some extra steps.

2022/11/10

dsynth without stopping

If you have a bulk build of packages happening with dsynth(1), you can now add – literally, that’s the command – to the package list without interrupting the build.

2022/09/092022/09/08

Moving dsynth

If you’re moving your dsynth build to a different machine, there’s now a ‘list-system’ directive that lets you recreate the same setup in a new place.

2022/07/222022/07/21

Where the (dports) action is

I mentioned a new committer for DragonFly, Sergey Zigachev, recently. He hasn’t shown in the commit logs for DragonFly directly – cause he’s fixing up dports. I’m mentioning that because the amount of work that goes into dports to keep all those ports working on DragonFly is separate and unseen – but necessary.

2022/06/07

New dports, new point release

There’s a new dports build, and there’s been some updates so a new point release to 6.2.2 for DragonFly is a good idea. The new binary packages are available now with ‘pkg upgrade’, and I’ll work on 6.2.2 over the next few days.

2022/03/092022/03/07

New US mirror for DragonFly

Sandy River is the newest DragonFly mirror, with ISOs and dports packages.

2022/03/072022/03/04

New binary packages for DragonFly

It’s based off 2022Q1 from FreeBSD Ports, and it’s available now through pkg.

2022/03/01

pkg and Meta v1 support

If you run pkg on DragonFly and get a warning about “Meta v1 support ending”, it’s only a warning. It will go away on its own.

2021/12/10

Rebuilding samba

If you are running bleeding-edge DragonFly _and_ installed the newest dports binary package build _and_ you are using Samba, you may need to update and rebuild.

2021/12/032021/12/02

New 2021Q4 binary packages

There’s a new build of binary packages for DragonFly, based off the 2021Q4 quarterly ports release. This will require an upgrade of most if not all packages cause of a switch from LibreSSL to OpenSSL as the default SSL library.

2021/11/30

dsynth updates

There’s been a number of updates to dsynth(1), the DragonFly package-building tool. This won’t matter much unless you like building the entire ports collection at once, but it is interesting to see how resource-intensive chromium building can be.

2021/10/132021/10/12

DragonFly 6.0.1 released!

6.0.1 is tagged and available. The major reason for this update is an expired Let’s Encrypt certificate that would cause problems when downloading dpkg binaries. A list of 6.0.1 commits is available.

I recommend the usual rebuild process mentioned on the 6.0 release notes:

make buildworld
make buildkernel
make installkernel
make installworld
make upgrade

Don’t forget to update your packages with ‘pkg upgrade’.

2021/10/052021/10/04

Let’s Encrypt cert problem fixed

If you have encountered that problem with Let’s Encrypt and dports, the fix is committed and a make world is needed.

2021/09/30

Let’s Encrypt certs and pkg

You may get some errors because of an expiring base Let’s Encrypt certificate when using pkg. It’s being worked on.

2021/09/082021/09/06

Keeping a package unchanged

The recent tmux package update reminds me to mention ‘pkg lock’. When you update packages, pkg will update everything. If there’s a package you don’t want changed, the pkg lock(8) command will keep it at the current version. There can be some other packages held back because of dependencies, but that’s OK. Don’t forget to pkg unlock when no longer needed…

2021/09/072021/09/06

tmux post fixed

If you want to update to the now fixed tmux port, you’ll want to add a -f to the pkg command to force it; the version number hasn’t changed.