"stable" ports?

[Ivan Voras]

Doug Hardie wrote:
> On 29 March 2010, at 08:57, Ivan Voras wrote:
> 
>> In some cases the burdens are obvious - the maintainer(s) would need to
>> e.g. maintain three versions of the ports - a random example would be
>> e.g. X.Org 7.0 for 6.x, 7.2 for 7.x and 7.4 for 8.x. Another would be
>> keeping PHP 5.2 for 7.x and 8.x and having 5.3 in the future
>> (CURRENT/9.x) branch.
> 
> I am a bit concerned about your concept of maintain, being able to build a port successfully, does not necessarily mean it will work properly.  For example, qpopper (which I maintain) has an issue where one feature does not work properly on 64 bit machines where it works fine on 32 bit machines.  In addition, there are a number of other machine types that are currently not heavily used but might become so in the future.  Thats a lot of different combinations of hardware and OSs to keep running for the maintainers.  

It was done (in Linux), hence it can be done. If all else fails and both 
the project and the maintainer cannot find suitable build and test 
machines, I'd suggest using ONLY_FOR_ARCHS, or doing the whole "stable" 
dance only for Tier 1 platforms (enumerated in 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/committers-guide/archs.html to be 
i386, amd64, pc98). AFAIK from the ports POW, pc98 and i386 are too 
close to be considered separately.

Virtualization (VirtualBox) may help maintainers test on the 
architecture they don't run natively.