Installing software on FreeBSD is made easier by the ports system; a collection of Makefiles and patches that contains instructions on how to build programs and libraries. E.g. building and installing the mpv media player is done in the following way:

# cd /usr/ports/multimedia/mpv
# make install clean

This first checks if all the requisites are available and installs them if not. Then it builds and installs mpv itself.

In this article I want to explain how to create and file a bug report for a port.

Recently I tried to use the pulseaudio sound server with mpv, the build failed:

Checking for SDL (1.x)                                    : disabled
Checking for OSS (implementation from opensound.com)      : no
Checking for OSS (platform-specific OSS implementation)   : yes
Checking for OSS (emulation on top of SunAudio)           : oss-audio-native found
Checking for OSS audio output                             : yes
Checking for audio select()                               : yes
Checking for RSound audio output                          : no
Checking for sndio audio input/output                     : no
Checking for PulseAudio audio output                      : no
You manually enabled the feature 'pulse', but the autodetection check failed.
*** Error code 1

Since I know that pulseaudio is installed and running, there must be something wrong with the port.

First I create two copies of the port, and try to build the software:

> mkdir ~/tmp/ports
> cd ~/tmp/ports
> cp -Rp /usr/ports/multimedia/mpv .
> cp -Rp mpv mpv.orig
> cd mpv
> make

When the build fails, I look into the work directory to find mentions of pulseaudio:

> cd work/mpv-player-mpv-88f247c/
> grep '[Pp]ulse' *
README.md:- Audio output development headers (libasound, pulseaudio)
old-configure:    opt_yes_no _pulse       "Pulseaudio audio output"
old-configure:check_pkg_config "PulseAudio" $_pulse PULSE 'libpulse >= 1.0'
old-makefile:SOURCES-$(PULSE)                += audio/out/ao_pulse.c
wscript:        'name': '--pulse',
wscript:        'desc': 'PulseAudio audio output',
wscript:        'func': check_pkg_config('libpulse', '>= 1.0')
wscript_build.py:        ( "audio/out/ao_pulse.c",                "pulse" ),
wscript_build.py.bak:        ( "audio/out/ao_pulse.c",                "pulse" ),

The last match from the wscript file caught my eye, since the installed version of pulseaudio is:

> pkg info -x pulse
pulseaudio-0.9.23_2

At this point I could try and update the pulseaudio port, but the simplest fix is to patch wscript and see if that works:

> cp wscript wscript.orig
> gvim wscript
> diff -u wscript.orig wscript
--- wscript.orig    2014-08-23 11:02:47.000000000 +0200
+++ wscript 2014-08-23 11:05:06.000000000 +0200
@@ -468,7 +468,7 @@
    }, {
        'name': '--pulse',
        'desc': 'PulseAudio audio output',
-        'func': check_pkg_config('libpulse', '>= 1.0')
+        'func': check_pkg_config('libpulse', '>= 0.9')
    }, {
        'name': '--portaudio',
        'desc': 'PortAudio audio output',

To make this patch apply automatically in the build process, it has to be put in the files subdirectory of the port. Since that doesn’t exist yet for mpv, it is created first:

> mkdir ../../files
> diff -u wscript.orig wscript >../../files/patch-wscript

With this change, the build works fine:

> cd ../..
> make clean
===>  Cleaning for mpv-0.5.0_1,1
> make
...
Waf: Leaving directory `/home/rsmith/tmp/ports/mpv/work/mpv-player-mpv-88f247c/build'
'build' finished successfully (18.027s)
===>  Staging for mpv-0.5.0_1,1
...
====> Compressing man pages (compress-man)

After installing and trying the modified port, it turned out that it works correctly.

The next step is to create a diff between the unmodified and the modified port:

> make clean
> cd ..
> diff -ruN mpv.orig mpv >patch-mpv
> cat patch-mpv
diff -ruN mpv.orig/files/patch-wscript mpv/files/patch-wscript
--- mpv.orig/files/patch-wscript    1970-01-01 01:00:00.000000000 +0100
+++ mpv/files/patch-wscript 2014-08-23 11:07:30.000000000 +0200
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+--- wscript.orig   2014-08-23 11:02:47.000000000 +0200
++++ wscript        2014-08-23 11:05:06.000000000 +0200
+@@ -468,7 +468,7 @@
+     }, {
+         'name': '--pulse',
+         'desc': 'PulseAudio audio output',
+-        'func': check_pkg_config('libpulse', '>= 1.0')
++        'func': check_pkg_config('libpulse', '>= 0.9')
+     }, {
+         'name': '--portaudio',
+         'desc': 'PortAudio audio output',

This patch is then submitted to FreeBSD’s bugzilla. It is listed as bug 192941. It has the above mentioned patch attached. Note that the description starts with the word [patch] to let the maintainers know that the bug report contains a solution to the problem. The name and directory of the port are also part of the description.

←  Repairing a color laserjet 2550 Making saline solution  →