How to install ports as a normal system user [11/16/04 - laszlof]

A few days ago I was confronted with a build issue on one of the several ports I maintain for the FreeBSD Project. The issue was only on a sparc64 platform, which at the time, I did not have access to. A good friend of mine, who is also a FreeBSD port manager, offered me a normal vanilla shell account on his sparc64 system. For security reasons, he did not want to allow my account access to any type of superuser functions. That being said, I needed to find a way to build the ports as a normal system user without root priviledges. I started digging through the "rats nest" we call bsd.port.mk to see what kind of modifications I was going to have to make, and ended up with a pretty nice little script in the end that set's up a local users environment for port builds.

At this point, I could continue to explain exactly how I did this. But since most people who would like this feature probably "know what they are doing" I will just provide the script that I created for other to download. I will be writing formal documentation for The FreeBSD Diary and possibly also the Porters Handbook.

I describe this script as beta quality at best, I'm sure there are some bugs in the system, and I am open for patches/suggestions. You can email me at laszlof AT vonostingroup DOT com with questions/concerns. Which is where I recieved all my FreeBSD related emails. This software is public domain, please feel free to do whatever you want with it, of course give credit where credit is due.

I've now officially named this, "luserports." Meaning local user ports of course ;)