is this even possible? a number of google results have informed me that it isn't, but i'm hoping there's a hack or a work around. essentially, i want to build the packages on one box, copy them to many boxes and run package_add there.
Correct. This is something that comes up every so often on the lists, in a "wouldn't it be nice if..." sort of way. Unfortunately, to get the ports tree from working the way it does now changed into doing things in a way that would make what you want possible is a major feat of engineering. There have been some PRs proposing changes that would facilitate such a change, but those patches haven't been applied -- eg.
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=ports/28155
You can see why it hasn't been applied by reading the follow-ups in that PR. Too much stuff in the ports tree would break.
The canonical answer to this problem is to set up a jail(8) environment specifically for building ports in -- which is essentially the way the FreeBSD package building cluster works.
A somewhat less popular answer would be to look at NetBSD's pkgsrc system or whatever the OpenBSD packaging system is called -- either of which can be ported to FreeBSD relatively easily, and which I think have the capability to create their own style of packages without installing them first.
Cheers,
Matthew
--
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 8 Dane Court Manor
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