Release engineering: FreeBSD

The purpose of this page is to describe the steps which must be taken in the release engineering process to ensure painless creation of packages for FreeBSD.

Package metadata

Whereas with Linux distributions it is common to include package metadata in the release tarball, FreeBSD keeps it all in its own ports repository. Package metadata for Varnish are in www/varnish.

Varnish is a good open source citizen with a clean autotools-based build system, so in most cases, preparing a new version of the Varnish port is simply a matter of updating the version number, running make makesum to download the tarball and update the checksum, and committing the changes.

In some cases, it may be necessary to update the packing list (pkg-plist) and / or the list of man pages (MAN[1-9] in the Makefile).

Package generation

This is done automatically by the FreeBSD ports cluster once the update has been committed.

% cd /usr/ports/www/varnish
% make package