marking ports BROKEN vs. IGNORE
Oliver Eikemeier
eikemeier at fillmore-labs.com
Sun Mar 14 04:42:44 PST 2004
In a recent discussion we noticed that there are no clear guidelines whether a
port should be marked IGNORE or BROKEN.
To give an example:
- a port tries to autodetect /usr/lib/libmilter.a, and if it isn't found bails
out, telling the user to upgrade the base system or depend on the port.
I opted for BROKEN, since we might remove sendmail from the base system
altogether (as recently discussed on developers@), and we will see the port
failing on bento then, instead of silently not building packages.
Examples are mail/spamass-milter, mail/sccmilter, mail/sentinel,
mail/milter-sender and mail/kavmilter.
Most ports use IGNORE when they find the wrong perl version, but
mail/maildirsync uses BROKEN.
OTOH BROKEN is used when they don't compile on a certain platform, even though
there are ONLY_FOR_ARCHS and NOT_FOR_ARCHS, which imply IGNORE.
The FreeBSD Porter's Handbook is not excessively clear about that point:
<http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/dads-broken.html>
- "If in doubt, do use IGNORE ..."
bsd.port.mk says:
- IGNORE [...] should be used sparingly.
So maybe we can get a clarification on this and add this to the porter's
handbook?
-Oliver
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