A Few Additional Tips on using pkgsrc with DragonFlyBSD

In my installation article I mention the excellent wiki guide on using pkgsrc in DragonFly. Here are a few additional things that I ran into. None of them couldn't be solved with a little digging, but it is hoped that it will save the reader a little time.

First, the wiki guide tells you to add a patch (to which it links) as soon as you've downloaded pkgsrc. This patch has actually been superseded by the one on The DragonFly Digest page The wiki guide recommends adding a few things to your path. If you've just installed DragonFly, you may only have sh and csh available. If you're used to Bourne style shells, but are using csh until you install bash or the like, you might not realize that it's a bit different in csh. To add additional paths, rather than the bash style PATH=$PATH://usr/pkg/bin one adds

setenv PATH ${PATH}:/usr/pkg/bin

In csh the : has to be set off by {}. This is in the csh man page. Also, note that this must be added to your .login (or .cshrc) file in your home directory. The .profile file is only for sh.

You'll find that if you install X from pkgsrc, rather than placing things in /usr/X11R6 it will place them in /usr/pkg/xorg. So, in addition to the wiki's instructions, add /usr/pkg/xorg/bin to your $PATH variable.

The wiki also suggests adding /usr/pkg/man to MANPATH. This can be done in /etc/manpath.config. Actually, I forgot to do this, and still got a manpage for something installed in packages, so perhaps it isn't necessary. However, as soon as I realized I forgot it, I changed it, so perhaps I just got lucky.

Those were the only issues that I found that weren't covered by the wiki. Most of them were covered on the article on pkgsrc appearing on gobsd.com's page.