Re: Correctly create a symbolic link in a port

>>> Hello everyone,
>>>
>>> I am currently working on porting a BitTorrent client designed to run on the
>>> I2P network. While I originally intended to prioritize porting other tools,
>>> such as the Monero CLI [1] and SimpleX Chat CLI [2] [3], I unfortunately ran
>>> into challenges that were too complex for me to solve. Although I received
>>> some help with the Monero port, we were unable to achieve a fully functional
>>> result.
>>>
>>> At this point, I am focusing on this BitTorrent client, as I find it very
>>> useful to be able to run it as a background service on torrent seeding
>>> servers. However, I have encountered a specific problem that I have yet to
>>> resolve: in order to enable the command line interface, a symbolic link must
>>> be created from the "XD" binary to "XD-CLI". Despite several attempts, I
>>> continue to encounter errors when building the package.
>
> don't overthink things.
>
> assuming you mean you want a ${PREFIX}/bin/XD-CLI that links to the
> existing XD binary in the same dir then you want something like this
> in post-install:
>
> ln -s XD ${PREFIX}/bin/XD-CLI
>
> then the usual, clean things from the previous build assuming you
> have one, and regen plist. "make clean=fake; make plist"

Thank you very much; this worked for me. However, I've encountered
another issue: I'm unable to set the owner and group for the directories
created by the Makefile. I've tried several approaches:

1. Adding the -o and -g options to ${INSTALL_DATA} and ${INSTALL_DATA_DIR}.

2. Directly adding chown commands to the post-install section.

3. Adding @owner and @group to the PLIST file.

None of these methods have successfully set the owner and group of the
directories to the daemon user and group. The directories consistently
end up with root as the owner and wheel as the group. I don't want to
use the -m 777 option, as that would be insecure.

>
>> This doesn't help much, as you aren't sharing what issues are you
>> running into.
>
> ...or what was tried.
>
>> There 261 Makefiles that use 'ln -s' according to
>>
>> find . -type f \( -path './pobj/*' -o -path './mystuff/*' \) -prune -o \
>> -name Makefile -exec grep -Fl 'ln -s' {} + | wc -l
>>
>> Quite a bunch of them do it for linking binaries during the install
>> phase. Of those, all the ones I checked do it in the post-install
>> target, so maybe you should stick to that pattern. Also, in those cases,
>> what I saw is that the links are either cwd -> ${PREFIX}/... or
>> ${TRUEPREFIX}/... -> ${PREFIX}/... . Read bsd.port.mk(5), in particular
>> the parts for TRUEPREFIX and the section "THE FAKE FRAMEWORK", which
>> explicitly addresses symlinks.
>>
>> Lucas
>>
>

I have attached the current state of the port to this email.