How do I recursively apply PKGREPOSITORY when calling make package-recursive in FreeBSD?

Question

I'm trying to create a package of Apache and its dependencies:

sudo make package-recursive \
__MAKE_CONF=~/make.apache22.conf \
PKGREPSOITORY=/usr/home/gvkv

Everything works fine; Apache and its dependencies compile and install and apache22.tbz is in gvkv. The problem is that the dependency packages are built in their respective ports/<package> directories! There are about fifteen of them and while it's easy enough to retrieve them with find and a perl one-liner, surely there must be a way to tell make to run in an environment such that the dependency packages end up in gvkv.

Answer 1

Part of the fun of using FreeBSD is dealing with the ports subsystem. It's good in many ways--easy installation and upgrading within the FreeBSD ecosystem but poor in others--setting variables via make configuration files or environment don't work as expected or even as advertised.

Nevertheless, SirDice has come to the rescue with a neat little trick:

mount -t nullfs /directory/for/pkgs /usr/ports/packages

which is really cool because it bypasses the use of environment variables and you can set the destination directory for wherever you want. Very helpful if you're (like me) using a 'build-jail' to make packages that are installed on different systems or other jails.

The /usr/ports/packages directory is where PACKAGES points to (if it exists) which is supposedly able to point somewhere else but didn't work for me. The man page stipulates setting PKGREPOSITORY which only works if you are building a single package.

Answer 2

I've read that that PKGREPOSITORY is dependent on PACKAGES.

You can set PACKAGES in /etc/make.conf. For example:

DISTDIR= /opt/portbuild/distfiles
PACKAGES=/opt/portbuild/packages