The portshaker utility maintains a set of target ports trees containing ports provided by source ports trees.

A single target ports tree can contain ports from any number of source ports trees. If a port is provided by more than one source ports tree, portshaker will merge the latest version of this port in the target ports tree.

As portshaker can maintain any number of target ports tree, it is particularly handy if you want to use customized ports trees with tinderbox / poudriere.

For install instructions, please refer to the INSTALL file. After installing, you will have to configure portshaker(8) since it is a toolkit and does nothing out of the box. Configuration instructions are provided in the distribution man pages: portshaker(8), portshaker.conf(5) and portshaker.d(5).

IN ORDER TO PRODUCE REPRODUCTIBLE RESULTS, THE PORTSHAKER(8) PROGRAM'S FIRST ACTION WHEN MERGING PORTS IS TO RESET THE DESTINATION PORTS TREE. AS A CONSEQUENCE, IF YOU HAVE LOCAL EDITS IN YOUR TARGET PORTS TREE, THEY WILL BE LOST (AND SO DO ANY OTHER FILE IN THE DIRECTORY, E.G. VCS CONTROL FILES).

Portions of sources of this tools code have been stolen from the following files from a FreeBSD 7.0-STABLE box:

• /etc/rc.subr
• /usr/share/man/man5/rc.conf.5.gz