PortRat

This project is on definate hiatus if not on its death bed. I'll be working on implementing parallel builds in the FreeBSD ports collection for GSoC 2008.

PortRat is a port management tool built almost exclusively to allow its user to install more than one port at once with parallel make jobs. It's written in C and has no outstanding dependencies, and is designed to take advantage of tools that the FreeBSD base installation provides.

Currently, you can grab PortRat from its svn repository here on Sourceforge.

As of right now, PortRat has the following features:

Smart dependency handling for more than one port
Recursive make config before starting its building process
Offers the option to make clean before a build
Because of the smart dependency handling, more than one build/install process can be run at a time. Of course, this is not always going to work, but in many test cases, it has worked just fine
Dependency tree dumps

In the future, I hope to implement the following features:

(Possibly) CPU binding and limiting. Serious heat issues arrise when you have multiple large builds on machines like laptops with sub par cooling.
Downloading distfiles in the background when job stack isn't full
The ability to upgrade ports and their dependencies (low priority)
Recursive deinstallation (low priority)

As an example, this is how you would use PortRat to build io, vim, and irssi on using a common dependency tree:

portrat -micBT -DWITHOUT_X11 lang/io editors/vim irc/irssi

micBT tells PortRat to make, install, and clean, as well as remove the build only dependencies and dump the dependency tree once it is built. The -DWITHOUT_X11 should look familiar, as it is a common way to pass arguments to make when building ports normally.

If you happen to come across a bugs, please point it out to me, so that I can prioritize. If you have a feature request, feel free to do the same. For now, you can reach me through Sourceforge.