PfSense seems impossible to build
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After four hours of utter frustration due to the attempt to build pfSense, I thought I post a comment on my experience.
First, I have previously worked with firewall appliances but am new to pfSense. I am generally impressed with pfSense, so much so that after running it on a PC as my main firewall, I bought an SG-1000 with Gold subscription. The pfSense book and hangouts accessible with the subscription are wonderful.
After some tinkering with lcdcproc, I took on the attempt to compile pfSense to explore the possibility to further contribute. I have contributed to other firewall software before, where the process was as simple as install OS, clone git repository, and run the build script.
Taking the above approach failed miserable with pfSense. The build script complain right away about "nonSense" files missing. The furthest I got was using the "pfSense" build name and circumventing licensing regulation. But not only is this prohibited, it will also eventually fail to create a working distro.
I have searched the internet for several hours. I cannot definitely say that the information required to build a "nonSense" distro is not available anywhere, but it is certainly impossible to find in a reasonable amount of time.
I saw posts from several noobs with similar problems who gave up trying due to the lack of community support. So my issues are not solely due to PEBKAC. I understand that supporting noobs is inconvenient, but it would take the pros probably less than an hour to put a wiki post with the compile steps together.
Please support us noobs in our desire to contribute. We need instructions for building pfsense and add-on packages please.
I hope that my experience provides some food for thought.
Cheers!
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Why do you need to build compiled sources in order to contribute?
Sure, if you want to contribute changes to compiled pieces then you need to be able to compile them, but those are only small parts in the backend or small patches to ports of some things.
I have contributed bucketloads of fixes/changes/enhancements and never compiled a thing. There is plenty of PHP code driving both the front-end GUI and the back-end control that is easily worked on. Just install the pfSense software somewhere (VM or test hardware) and use git/gitsync/github to fork/clone/edit/commit/make pull requests. -
Your method works fine until you need a C compiler, which is for security reasons not included in pfSense.
Compile instructions are not an unusual request for an open source project, and it was not my intent (and I will not) argue the case. I made a suggestion and let it stand as is.
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Yes, that's fine. I fully understand that if you are going to modify a component written in a compiled language then you need to have a working build process somewhere and easy way to deploy the changed executables to a test system. I was just pointing out that a lot of contributions can be developed and tested without needing that environment set up.