Building Binary PC-BSD Packages
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Step 8: Upload the PBI

Once you've tested your PBI, you can submit it for inclusion on the PC-BSD site so other PC-BSD users can use it.

This is a two-step process. Start by posting a message to the PBIs ready for test wiki; make sure your posting includes the required PBI information. If the PBI testers run across any problems with your PBI, they will reply to your posting. Otherwise, they'll let you know when the PBI is approved and added to the pbiDIR website.

Next, upload your PBI to a FTP server. If this is your first PBI, click on the private message button on the PBI team profile. The PBI team will send you the login information you will need to access the ftp server.

Conclusion

If you haven't had a chance to check out PC-BSD for yourself, I highly recommend it as a desktop for both advanced and casual BSD users. If there currently isn't a PBI for your favorite application, set aside an afternoon and see if you can generate one yourself. You'll find it to be a very satisfying, and possibly addictive, experience.

Dru Lavigne is a network and systems administrator, IT instructor, author and international speaker. She has over a decade of experience administering and teaching Netware, Microsoft, Cisco, Checkpoint, SCO, Solaris, Linux, and BSD systems. A prolific author, she pens the popular FreeBSD Basics column for O'Reilly and is author of BSD Hacks and The Best of FreeBSD Basics.

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Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

• Thanks, and a question
  2006-01-19 19:13:11  Thib [Reply | View]
  
  
  Thanks for this very useful tutorial.
  
  I have an immediate question regarding the early steps of the process, which are to install the corresponding package, which uncovers missing dependencies, and to install the latter recursively. What happens if the system on which the PBI package is being created already has some of the dependencies for a given package installed? The process described would miss packaging some of the dependencies that may not exist on an end user's system; and testing the resulting PBI package on the originating system may not fail. Could you clarify the process or perhaps give strategies to deal with this kind of situation?
  
  PC-BSD is still a newcomer environment and there is a general lack of PBI packages for many basic applications, so I encourage all fellow readers and PC-BSD users to help create PBI packages for the community.
  
  
• Thanks, and a question
  2006-01-21 06:29:22  Dru Lavigne | [Reply | View]
  
  
  I have a spare system I do all of my testing on so I always start with a fresh install before I create and test a PBI. Fortunately, the install takes less than 10 minutes--just the time needed to make a fresh pot of coffee :-)