I think the major difference is the 1.35 tarball contained a vendor directory in the tarball:
[dan@r710-01:~/tmp/librenms-1.35/vendor] $ ls
amenadiel composer easybook palanik php-amqplib ramsey slim tecnickcom
autoload.php dapphp ezyang pear phpmailer rmccue symfony xjtuwangke
I think that’s the difference. It was provided and we just used that. We could patch it correctly as it was just there at install time.
The difference now is we can’t download the tarball, extract the code, patch it and supply it as a package. NOTE: these are not manual steps, they are complete automated by the FreeBSD port tree.
When you run composer, what command are you running? Perhaps we can just specify that in our Makefile.