portlint and portclippy are also helpful at times (and somewhat mandatory before your port gets submitted anyway).Thank you for the encouragement and the comentary!Personally, I think that if it takes you one day per porter's handbook page you're doing it wrong. I'd recommend reading the overall sections familiarizing yourself with the architecture & underlying concepts. Then, move on to examining existing ports. Once you encounter something in an existing port that you don't understand based on what you've read in the handbook before, go look that particular thing up in the handbook. Use it more as a reference.
For example, there is no point in reading all the sections about "how to use perl", "how to use go", "how to use ..." if you know that you're going to port a python module.
Also, doing wins over studying with this sort of thing. There is no harm done by just starting to create a Makefile and going step-by-step. Use ports-mgmt/poudriere-devel to easily test your ports. In many cases it will tell you what is not working out. Tools likeportlintandportclippyare also helpful at times (and somewhat mandatory before your port gets submitted anyway).
Depending your experience with building software, it might also be helpful to start with something easier in the beginning. I don't know bpy but it could be a bit hairy in the beginning as I assume that you'll have to deal with the blender dependency which may or may not need different options etc.
Compared to other OS / ecosystems, I feel like FreeBSD has a very easy approach to creating & maintaining ports. I created my first port about a year ago and now it's seven (with more in the pipeline).
The TL;DR of this is: Don't get discouraged by not knowing things - none of us knew anything about anything. We all learned it - one way or another
..for some entertaining context I spent bits and pieces of the day I first got curious about it reading through the first few sections of the handbook, up to slow porting, and haven't gone back to it since. other priorities. So you can do the math as to how many pages of the book I'm averaging per day.. ..giggle.. Sounds like 'porting' is: "automating the process I just did to help others". Perhaps ..anything else I say will be a ramble. I have much, much more reading to do before I can ask anything intelligent In my opinion that is indeed the case: They are two separate things. Although I guess it makes more sense to refer to them as "separate tasks" instead. Personally, I always make things work on my machine before I even think of creating the port for it. After all, a port is merely a recipe to automate the steps you performed to get it working so that others can get it working too (but then in a more automated way).
Maybe this information -is- in the handbook? I'll include it in my research That is not covered in any of the FreeBSD handbooks because it doesn't really have anything to do with FreeBSD (as an OS).
That is called learning - you're doing great!
..back for more entertainment.. having looked through this, it is now clear to me that even -this- is putting the cart before the horse. It's still all about ports. Sure it's encouraging in the sense that it becomes clear that there is some software that can be considered "more main-stream", such that porting it will be easier, as you said. The question remains, how to get the software working in the first place. I've now found this: Install pip on bsd. Let that be the measure of how much I know about bsd, I was like: "oh! wow! you can do all that? Looks almost like what I do on linux! ..hehe!.. ..well, back to other things..