On Thu, 28 May 1998, Christofer C. Bell wrote:

: I'd like to cause the FreeBSD system to use /usr/pkg as the install base
: for packages and I am not sure how to go about it.  I don't want to have
: to remember to set the install location manually each time I install
: software.  I think this is supposed to be a trivial modification to
: /usr/share/mk/bsd.port.mk but I want to be sure that this is a clean and
: complete as possible.

No modification.  On FreeBSD, add this to /etc/make.conf (their equivalent
to /etc/mk.conf).  Note that it is LOCALBASE, not PREFIX; PREFIX is a
dynamically set variable, whereas LOCALBASE is the configuration one.

LOCALBASE=/usr/pkg

Note that many (read: 30-40%) of the FreeBSD ports are either not set up to
"fix" /usr/local in those that need it, or even patch the packages to
deliberately use /usr/local instead of ${LOCALBASE}.  You may want to
consider using NetBSD's pkgsrc directly on FreeBSD; not every pkg is
guaranteed to work, but most are generic enough to work on both.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)