6.2. MD/MI vs. general PLIST

6.2.1. PLIST_SRC

To use one or more files as source for the PLIST used in generating the binary package, set the variable PLIST_SRC to the names of that file(s). The files are later concatenated using cat(1), and order of things is an important issue, see below.

6.2.2. PLIST-mi, PLIST-md.shared, PLIST-md.static

If PLIST_SRC is not set (the usual case), and if there is no pkg/PLIST, the packages system looks for pkg/PLIST-mi, and pkg/PLIST-md.shared or pkg/PLIST-md.static to handle differences due to the platform being able to handle shared libs or not. PLIST-mi contains machine independent files, PLIST-md.* contain machine dependent files, which may differ between architectures that don't support dynamic libs/shared loading.

Currently, this is only used in the perl-packages, and as perl5 on alpha doesn't support dynamic loading of extensions like perl/Tk yet, PLIST.mi-static is also used on the alpha (besides pmax and powerpc). Alpha will hopefully be removed soon when perl's fixed for dynamic loading.

(This handling of MI/MD PLIST files is implemented by setting PLIST_SRC to either "PLIST-mi PLIST-md.static" or "PLIST-mi PLIST-md.shared", see /usr/pkgsrc/mk/bsd.pkg.mk).

6.2.3. Order in the PLIST* file(s)

There is one gotcha regarding the ordering of ``@dirrm'' statements: any MI ``@dirrm'' directives that follow any MD ``@dirrm''s must go into the PLIST.md-* files, as the files PLIST-mi and PLIST.md-{shared/static} are concatenated in exactly this order. If the MI directory would be listed in PLIST-mi, it would be removed before the MD directory, which wouldn't work.

E.g. if you have the following dirs:

        foo/mi
        foo/mi/md
  

        nothing
  

        @dirrm foo/mi/md
        @dirrm foo/mi
  

This will lead to some ``@dirrm'' statements being duplicated, but it's the only way to ensure everything is properly removed. The same care must be taken when PLIST_SRC is set to some package-specific settings.