# Package Building Procedures

### The FreeBSD Ports Management Team

Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 The FreeBSD Ports Management Team

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# 1 Introduction and Conventions

In order to provide pre-compiled binaries of third-party applications for FreeBSD, the Ports Collection is regularly built on one of the “Package Building Clusters.” Currently, the main cluster in use is at http://pointyhat.FreeBSD.org.

Most of the package building magic occurs under the `/var/portbuild` directory. Unless otherwise specified, all paths will be relative to this location. `${arch}` will be used to specify one of the package architectures (amd64, i386™, ia64, powerpc, and SPARC64®), and `${branch}` will be used to specify the build branch (6, 7, 7-exp, 8, 8-exp, 9, 9-exp).

> Note: Packages are no longer built for Release 4 or 5, nor for the alpha architecture.

The scripts that control all of this live in `/var/portbuild/scripts/`. These are the checked-out copies from `/usr/ports/Tools/portbuild/scripts/`.

Typically, incremental builds are done that use previous packages as dependencies; this takes less time, and puts less load on the mirrors. Full builds are usually only done:

- right after release time, for the `-STABLE` branches

- periodically to test changes to `-CURRENT`

- for experimental builds

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