From: Lucas Gabriel Vuotto <lucas@sexy.is>
Subject: Re: Correctly create a symbolic link in a port
To: ports@openbsd.org
Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2024 00:32:25 +0000

On Sun, Sep 01, 2024 at 07:30:57PM GMT, David Uhden Collado wrote:
> 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.

This doesn't help much, as you aren't sharing what issues are you
running into.

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