pkg-gencontrol 1 user commands redo pkg-gencontrol helper utility for generating pkgng package manifests pkg-gencontrol --package-name -p package --version -v version --staging-directory -P staging-directory --user -u account --group -g account --prefix directory --origin origin --comment comment --description description --arch architecture --abi abi --www URL --maintainer maintainer pkg-gencontrol creates a pkgng manifest for the package named package, in a +MANIFEST file in staging-directory. This manifest is used by the create subcommand of pkg8. It is in FreeBSD's Universal Configuration Language format. Older and other package creation tools use the plist format for the +MANIFEST file, and also require other files named variously +BUILD_INFO, +BUILD_VERSION, +COMMENT, and +DESC. Modern versions of pkg8 that have switched to UCL take everything, including what was in those other files, from +MANIFEST, and that is the only file generated by pkg-gencontrol. The --version, --comment, and --description arguments set the version, comment, and description information in the manifest. Because pkg8 complains about manifests that lack them, they are in effect mandatory, albeit that this is not documented. The comment is encoded as a UCL string, so should not contain newlines. If reading it from file, one should use the -n 1 option to head1 or something similar. The description is encoded as a multiple‐line UCL string, and can contain newlines. The version is forcibly encoded as a string, to prevent UCL from seeing it as potentially a floating point number. The --prefix, --origin, --arch, --abi, --www, and --maintainer arguments set the prefix, origin, processor architecure, ABI, WWW home page, and maintainer information in the manifest, as displayed by the info subcommand of pkg8, and are optional. The prefix defaults to /, and the origin to local/package. The others are not written to the manifest if they are not set. This default of the origin is suitable for locally‐created packages, but for packages originating from the ports tree the correct origin (the relative subdirectory within the ports tree of the source, which is not necessarily the same as package) should be used. The entire subtree of staging-directory is scanned for files and subdirectories, all of which are included in the manifest, ignoring files at the top level whose names begin with a + character, and not following symbolic links. Their owners and primary groups are ignored, and written to the manifest as owner root and group wheel. The --user and --group options allow the owner and primary group of every file and directory entry to be set to account instead. pkg-gencontrol recognizes when the same file has been referenced by multiple hard links, and skips re‐processing it for hash values. It does this based upon the device number and inode number of the file, alone. If the staging-directory tree is being updated as pkg-gencontrol runs, in‐place modifications will not be recognized. Only run pkg-gencontrol against a quiescent tree. dpkg-gencontrol8 – which shares the -v, -p, and -P options with this command, but generates different control files for a different package creation tool. Jonathan de Boyne Pollard