OS Component Information
Relevant Commands
FreeBSD commands related to the packaging system:
pkg_info : get informaiton about installed packages
pkg_add : install a package (can be used to install into a chroot)
IRC Conversations
Some discussion from the #vesta IRC channel, in April 2008:
[#vesta] <jhavard> the bsd packaging system is mindnumbingly simple. [#vesta] <xorian> jhavard: The last time I tried (not very hard), I couldn't find any information about it. [#vesta] <jhavard> xorian: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=pkg_create&sektion=1&apropos=0&manpath=FreeBSD+6.3-RELEASE [#vesta] <jhavard> took me less than a minute
[#vesta] <xorian> jhavard: "pkg_info -W /usr/bin/gcc" and "pkg_info -W /usr/include/stdio.h" both give me nothing on my FreeBSD machine :-( [#vesta] <jhavard> Those aren't parts of a package. [#vesta] <jhavard> the base system is the base system. [#vesta] <xorian> jhavard: Is there some way to get a list of the files in the base system? Or to get an archive of the base system files? [#vesta] <xorian> jhavard: Clearly we need both of those in Vesta to do a FreeBSD-based build in Vesta. [#vesta] <jhavard> do a make world with an alternate root [#vesta] <jhavard> that will give you a base system with no packages. [#vesta] <jhavard> the jail manpage details how to do it properly.
JohnHavard mentioned the jail(8) man page.
[#vesta] <scottven> I doubt we need a full base system to compile Vesta though [#vesta] <scottven> which means doing a manual stdenv. yick. [#vesta] <xorian> scottven: Well, if it's inconvenient to prune out the stuff we don't need we could jsut pull it all in. Let somebody from the FreeBSD camp figure out how to import a smaller subset of files. [#vesta] <xorian> jhavard: I'm sure it includes plenty of stuff we don't need though, like /bin/sh, standard command-line utilities everyone expects, man pages, etc. [#vesta] <jhavard> exactly [#vesta] <jhavard> it can be trimmed down to next-to-nothing. [#vesta] jhavard used to do some neat stuff with picoBSD