GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Code-in 2011 FreeBSD

Document missing ports meta variables in the FreeBSD porters handbook

completed by: Eric Newberry

mentors: Eygene Ryabinkin, Eitan Adler

Description of task

The FreeBSD porters handbook has a short list of variables that exist in the ports infrastructure in order to encapsulate common dependencies that many ports have. This list is incomplete and can be found here: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/porters-handbook/makefile-depend.html#USE-VARS

A list of USE_variables (i.e. USE_MYSQL, USE_PGSQL, USE_SQLITE) can be found in the files located in the /usr/ports/Mk directory of a FreeBSD system. These have to be added to the porters handbook along with a description to help people creating ports make use of these variables. When adding these instructions to the porters handbook, the source code needs to be correctly formatted and must conform to our documentation source code style guidelines.

Task requires:


A FreeBSD system (in a VirtualBox Virtual Machine) installed on your computer. 
Knowledge of the documentation guidelines for the FreeBSD project: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/fdp-primer/
Check out a copy of the documentation tree from the documentation repository to get the source code for the chapter