Where is FreeBSD going?

[Kris Kennaway]

On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 11:09:49AM +0100, Dag-Erling Sm?rgrav wrote:
> Roman Neuhauser <neuhauser at bellavista.cz> writes:
> >     The ports freeze seems to last too long with recent releses. Or
> >     maybe it's just I've gotten more involved, but out of the last four
> >     months (2003/09/07-today), ports tree has been completely open
> >     for whopping 28 days.
> 
> I strongly suspect that this could be at least partially alleviated by
> giving portmgr more package-building hardware to play with.

It's certainly true that we're lacking in build hardware for some
non-i386 platforms (particularly sparc64), and this made it pretty
tricky to build packages for 5.2 on those architectures (a full
sparc64 build takes at least a month).  I've heard some rumours of
donated equipment waiting to be installed, but I don't know what the
status of that is.

Likewise, a 5.2 i386 build takes about a week, which means that the
freeze *cannot* be shorter than this, even if everything goes
perfectly (which, in practise, never happens).  This time around, the
freeze started on 23 Nov and was lifted on 3 Dec.  That's 10 days,
which is about as good as you could hope for.  If we could build
packages in - say - a day, we'd be able to cut the freeze time down
further, although I expect the duration would become limited by the
speed at which problems can be corrected.

Every now and then we get offers of access to a machine here or a
machine there to help with building packages.  The main problem with
donating machine resources is that there's limited space in the
freebsd.org equipment racks, and the package build system currently
needs LAN-equivalent connectivity between the machines.  To be useful
we'd either need a full cluster of faster machines located somewhere,
or to find time to rewrite the build scripts to work efficiently with
remote build resources.

Kris
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