Long-term idea: Convert plugins repo to FreeBSD ports overlay

[lattera]

The custom builds I produce were based on the Dynfi build scripts. These scripts use Poudriere for building all the required OPNsense packages. One thing I would love to do is be able to provide various OPNsense plugins pre-installed in my custom image.

Poudriere supports a concept of a Ports overlay. Overlays are what they sound like: a repository that gets overlayed on top of an existing Ports repository base.

One problem I found was that the OPNsense plugins repository contains duplicated directories for existing ports entries. For example: databases/redis, dns/bind, security/tor. Trying to use the plugins repository as an overlay causes Poudriere to get confused.

I wonder if it would make sense long-term to structure the plugins repo to better support being an overlay on top of an existing ports repository. This would be a pretty major shift from how the plugins repo is handled currently. However, the plugins repository could likely be made more efficient by switching to being an overlay. The plugins repo would gain the full power of the ports framework. Long-term maintenance burden would likely be smaller since the ports framework could be relied upon.

I thought I'd pose the question here and see what people's thoughts are. Obviously someone has to put in the work, and I'd probably put myself on the volunteer list.

[franco]

You could redump the locations to opnsense/os-xxx in the overlay or set symlinks for it. The package origin is already faked in that way, but the plugins are not full ports and likely never will be (same as core):

# pkg info os-debug-devel | grep Origin
Origin         : opnsense/os-debug-devel


Cheers,
Franco