Oh my gosh! I'm finally back, and am ready to start actually making usefull stuff. I recently got a new job, and my time was being occupied a lot. As for projects, the newest thing I wish to tackle is to create a console image viewer, which will probably be based off of picobsd's "view", and might just be added to that instead of making a different package. "View" currently allows you to view png's, I plan to add support for jpeg and gif.

After about 2 hours and some laughs from some committers, I found that bsd.port.mk already has a line that tests for root UID with:

@if [ `id -u` = 0 ]; then (blah)

Thanks for the help xanne, CyNick and Green :)

Now I'm *VERY* close to actually putting all this stuff in bsd.port.mk...which means only the testing and bug ridding proccess remain (which is one of the crappiest).

I spent about 4 or 5 hours looking over /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.port.mk as well as bothering some developers on efnet. Fortunately I have made some progress as to the infrastructure of the ports system. Heres what I found I need to do to bsd.port.mk:

Add test if uid is 0 then all paths change to those supplied:

PREFIX=${HOME}

MANPREFIX=${PREFIX}

WRKDIRPREFIX=${HOME}/ports

WRKDIR=${WRKDIRPREFIX}/${PORTNAME}/work

PKG_DBDIR=${HOME}/var/db/pkg/${PORTNAME}

I also plan to maybe completely use environment variables to make things well, not so static..but the above will remain as default (unless someone else things otherwise)

Some news on user-based ports. I now found out that I have quite a bit of work for this one. But i've managed to lay out basically what needs to happen.

- Change install path from /usr/local (or otherwise chosen) to ~/

- Change man install path to ~/

- Figure out how the hell to get ports to register and acknowledge registrations in ~/

- Change building directory (/usr/ports/[cat]/[port]/work to something else. Possibly ~/somewhere or in /tmp

- Do all this without breaking anything

Theoraretically my sketch is a little backwards, but it still works for me

Good news (finally). After some help from BigKnife (thanks) I'm starting to patch bsd.port.mk. Wish me luck!