if you have a machine that's always running on snapshots, export PKG_PATH 
in the environment using a url with .../snapshots/packages/%a (don't use %c 
instead of "snapshots"), then you don't need to bother with -Dsnap

you don't usually want FETCH_PACKAGES in mk.conf because then you can't use 
"make package" to build a package locally..

-- 
  Sent from a phone, apologies for poor formatting.

On 9 August 2026 23:11:16 Morgan Aldridge <morgant@makkintosshu.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 9, 2026 at 15:38 vansid <ovi1@vansid.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Aug 9, 2026 at 6:28 PM Stuart Henderson <stu@spacehopper.org> wrote:
>
>> I recommend setting 'SUDO=sudo -E' and "PORTS_PRIVSEP=Yes" in /etc/mk.conf
>> and configuring so that your user account can run things as _pbuild and
>> _pfetch without prompting, and as root with a password, e.g. like this in 
>> sudoers
>>
>> your_user ALL=(_pbuild) NOPASSWD: ALL, (_pfetch) NOPASSWD: ALL
>> your_user ALL=(ALL) SETENV: ALL
>>
>> then go to the dir for an individual port (e.g. cd /usr/ports/math/moo)
>> and as an exception to the normal rule, run "make fix-permissions" as
>> root.
>
> Thanks, I will definitely do that.  Sorry, just one more question...
>
> ZoneMinder has *a lot* of dependencies, all of which seem to resolve
> and work but only after a very long time of downloading and compiling
> all the related software.  When I was doing my initial testing (before
> I starting working on the actual OpenBSD ports tree process), I was
> able to install many of the dependencies with pre-compiled binaries
> from pkg_add which saved considerable time.  Is it possible to install
> dependent packages in this manner as part of the ports tree process,
> or must everything be installed from source according to each port's
> Makefile?
>
> Yup, per bsd.port.mk(5), you can set `FETCH_PACKAGES=-Dsnap` in your 
> `/etc/mk.conf`, as well:
>
> <https://man.openbsd.org/man5/bsd.port.mk.5#FETCH_PACKAGES>
>
>
> That's assuming you're building on -current, which is suggested. If you 
> have another machine or VM you're testing for -stable on, you can set 
> `FETCH_PACKAGES=` (the default is 'No', hence setting it to an empty value, 
> in this case.)
>
> Hope that helps,
>
> Morgan