What is glow?

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Glow is a renderer that renders markdown in your terminal
and makes it look beautiful while doing so.

Porting glow to OpenBSD

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Well, a quick look at the github repository of glow tells us
that glow is written in go, and we need go to compile it.

As always, manpages are the oracle in the world of OpenBSD.
Whenever you’re in doubt, consult the man-pages \

Consulting port-modules(5) it seems like lang/go will do the trick.
Also, do read up on go-module(5) before proceeding further. \

Let’s see if lang/go works.

Preparing the Makefile

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Copy the template Makefile and get to work!

    cp /usr/ports/infrastructure/templates/Makefile.template .
    mv Makefile.template Makefile

Even if you didn’t read go-module(5)(which I think everyone should)
The template Makefile is commented well enough, that you can virtually get around it without
consulting any further man pages.

I want to highlight two things from the template Makefile

    MODGO_MODNAME =	github.com/test/app
    MODGO_VERSION =	0.1.1

This is where I truly love OpenBSD. The infrastructure has been already laid down for us
so that, anybody(not necessarily with a programming background,although it helps) with
the right amount of reading comprehension skills can getstarted with writing a port. \

The first variable is MODGO_MODNAME, and it’s description in the Makefile template says
MODGO_MODNAME should be set to the ‘module’ specified in the 'go.mod' file.
Where is the go.mod file for our project? It is generally located at the project repository root dir
For us, it is not different. You can find it Here!.
For us, the value is, github.com/charmbracelet/glow/v2

The second variable is MODGO_VERSION, which refers to the version of the go module we are building.
And the version we are building,according to github is v2.0.0.

Ultimately, the makefile looks like this

COMMENT =       cli markdown renderer

MODGO_MODNAME =         github.com/charmbracelet/glow/v2

MODGO_VERSION = v2.0.0

DISTNAME =      glow-v2.0.0

CATEGORIES =    sysutils

HOMEPAGE =      https://github.com/charmbracelet/glow

MAINTAINER =            Neel Chakraborty <neelroboinfo365@gmail.com>

#MIT
PERMIT_PACKAGE =        Yes

MODULES =               lang/go

SEPARATE_BUILD =        Yes

.include "modules.inc"

.include <bsd.port.mk>

Wait! What is .include “modules.inc” doing there? And why is it there?
Turns out, for go to compile our software, it needs help of some external modules
We include those modules in modules.inc.
Well, how do we generate that file?

Time to consult the man-pages again!
Going through go-module(5), towards the end, we find that

This module adds one make(1) target:

modgo-gen-modules Generate the MODGO_MODULES and the MODGO_MODFILES lists. If MODGO_VERSION is set to “latest”, the latest known-to-Go version of a package will be used to build the list of modules. Similarly, if MODGO_VERSION is empty, the latest version will be fetched.

Well,well,well. Turns out the smart people at OpenBSD dev team has already done the
hard part for us. We just need to run make modgo-gen-modules > modules.inc and we are done!

make makesum,make build and friends

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Now we follow the usual porting checklist guide and go through generating a pkg dir and populating it with DESCR.
Then we run make build, if it passes, then make fake, etc etc, you know the drill.(If you don’t, read the porting guide)

That’s it. We have ported glow to OpenBSD.