GETTING STARTED WITH GPORTS

First, edit /etc/gbuild.conf (example provided).

Ports can be built as an unprivileged user; the system account "build" with home in /var/build is intended for this. Extract/press the Gales source repository somewhere writable by this user, e.g. /var/build/gales-linux ; this path will be referred to as REPO.

To build a given PORT, switch to the desired build user if necessary, then:
  cd REPO/gports/PORT
  gbuild

This should produce the package file NAME-MAJOR.MINOR-VERSION.sh.gz (or other extension if so configured in gbuild.conf) in the port directory, which must be writable. Then, as root, move it to /gales/dist/pkg/ for safe keeping if you like, then install:

gpkg-install -f /gales/dist/pkg/PKG.sh.gz

This will list the files as they're extracted and possibly show some informational messages. The -f bypasses GPG signature verification, which is fairly pointless in this usage since we're always building locally, but might be handy when managing a large fleet.

The switching users and moving around gets tedious when installing many ports; I tend to build a bunch at a time as dependencies allow. More automation might be in order. Of course you could do it all as root.

After installing a port, you should check for new configuration installed in /etc/examples/; for reasonable behavior, it's often necessary that this be copied to /etc/, with or without customization. Well-behaved gports never write directly to /etc/.

One design principle of Gales Linux is "the filesystem is the database". Thus there are no separate commands to list or uninstall packages; simply inspect or remove the subdirectories in /gales/pkg/. Thanks to static linking it is usually safe, if not recommended, to remove libraries after dependent packages are built; one exception is "ncurses" as it provides the terminfo database which is accessed at runtime. Likewise there is no "upgrade" operation; multiple versions can be installed in parallel and switched by adjusting the /gales/pkg/NAME symlink.

Suggested ports to start with, batched in build dependency order:

0:
bzip2
db
gnupg
links
m4
man-pages
man-pages-posix
mandoc
ncurses
pciutils
perl
zlib

1:
autoconf (m4 perl)
less (ncurses)
vim (ncurses)

2:
automake (autoconf perl)
readline (autoconf)

3:
bc (automake readline)
bison (automake m4)
libtool (automake)
sqlite (readline ncurses)
sqlite-doc

4:
flex (automake bison)
libevent (libtool)
libressl (libtool)

Depending on your programming language needs:

clisp (automake readline ncurses)
cl-hyperspec
ocaml
php (autoconf sqlite)
python (autoconf bzip2 db ncurses readline sqlite zlib)
python-docs

5:
openssh (autoconf libressl zlib)
tmux (libevent ncurses)
gdb (flex bison readline)
sbcl (clisp)