IMPORTANT

Updating MRI Ports Trees

Once a port has been developed, tested, and found to be reasonably stable, it's sent to the FreeBSD ports project or the MacPorts project to be committed. When a port is committed, it is added to the official ports collection available to anyone who subsequently installs the ports system, or upgrades their ports tree.

The process of committing FreeBSD ports and MacPorts can sometimes be a lengthy one. For my own ports, the delay between submitting the port and it being committed has ranged from a few hours to several months.

If you'd rather not wait until a port is committed, you can add it to your own ports tree using the update_jb_ports script. This script will download the frameworks for the uncommitted MRI ports available on this site, and insert them into your ports tree, so that they can be installed using the same commands as committed ports.

The overall process is as follows:

1. Install FreeBSD ports or MacPorts system, as appropriate. This will install the ports tree, and the tools needed to install and manage the ports within it. Once this is done, you can install any of the thousands of committed ports using the standard tools that come with the ports system, including committed versions of AFNI.

2. If you want access to the uncommitted ports available here:
   1. Download the update_jb_ports script and the update_jb_ports.md5 checksum file.

      For security reasons, you should always visually inspect any program downloaded from the WEB to make sure it doesn't contain any malicious code. Checksums should also be verified. If a download site doesn't provide checksums or other validation information, don't run their programs on your computer, especially as root! The checksum for update_jb_ports is generated using the following command:

      	md5 update_jb_ports
      	

      Run this command on your computer, and compare the output to the contents of the update_jb_ports.md5 file you downloaded from this site. If the results differ, then the script has been corrupted or tampered with in-transit, and should not be used.

   2. After verifying that the script is OK, run it as root:

      	chmod 755 update_jb_ports
      	sudo ./update_jb_ports
      	

3. Install the ports you need, following the instructions for FreeBSD or Mac. If there is a committed version of an MRI port, the newer version installed by update_jb_ports will have a "-latest" suffix.