Get the original sources (normally) as a compressed tarball (foo.tar.gz or foo.tar.Z) and copy it into DISTDIR. Always use mainstream sources when and where you can.
You will need to set the variable MASTER_SITES to reflect
where the original tarball resides. You will find convenient shorthand definitions for
most mainstream sites in bsd.sites.mk. Please use these
sites--and the associated definitions--if at all possible, to help avoid the problem of
having the same information repeated over again many times in the source base. As these
sites tend to change over time, this becomes a maintenance nightmare for everyone
involved.
If you cannot find a FTP/HTTP site that is well-connected to the net, or can only find
sites that have irritatingly non-standard formats, you might want to put a copy on a
reliable FTP or HTTP server that you control (e.g., your home page).
If you cannot find somewhere convenient and reliable to put the distfile we can
``house'' it ourselves on ftp.FreeBSD.org; however, this is the
least-preferred solution. The distfile must be placed into ~/public_distfiles/ of someone's freefall
account. Ask the person who commits your port to do this. This person will also set MASTER_SITES to MASTER_SITE_LOCAL and MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR to their freefall
username.
If your port's distfile changes all the time without any kind of version update by the
author, consider putting the distfile on your home page and listing it as the first MASTER_SITES. If you can, try to talk the port author out of doing
this; it really does help to establish some kind of source code control. Hosting your own
version will prevent users from getting ``checksum mismatch''
errors, and also reduce the workload of maintainers of our FTP site. Also, if there is
only one master site for the port, it is recommended that you house a backup at your site
and list it as the second MASTER_SITES.
If your port requires some additional `patches' that are available on the Internet,
fetch them too and put them in DISTDIR. Do not worry if they
come from a site other than where you got the main source tarball, we have a way to
handle these situations (see the description of PATCHFILES below).
