Editing the the sources of a port before installation

Question: What is the preferred method of modifying the sources of a given third party package before its installed? Allow me to clarify.

After installing Midnight Commander: [cmd=]sudo pkg_add -r mc[/cmd]

I found the package suffered from an ftp issue I sought to fix. I next removed mc, installed its port sources and after some wrestling with make patched the sources and installed the modified version successfully.

(Please bear with me here, I'm new to FreeBSD and am attempting to describe the problem using proper nomenclature).

If one needs to edit the sources of a port, yet one can only invoke make (that I'm currently aware of) to start the build process, how is it possible to first edit, then build a port's sources?

If my case to solve this, I invoked make followed by CTRL-C to disrupt the build process, edited the necessary file, then ran make again. But I'm thinking I've approached things the hard way when a better, more streamlined solution likely exists.
 
You basically want to do these:
Code:
make fetch     # fetches the distfile
make extract   # extracts the distfile into the work directory
make patch     # applies any specific FreeBSD patches
make configure # runs ./configure

After that you could edit the sources in the work directory. Once finished you can continue with the install.
 
But because this is make(1), earlier steps are done automatically. In other words, make patch is equivalent to make fetch extract patch.
 
Last edited:
Following SirDice's advice, I finally got rid of that annoying bug with directory naming dialog in Krusader (first symbol entered is not editable): required changing just a single word in the sources.
 
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