The future of portmaster [and of ports-mgmt/synth]

[Mark Millard]

Adam Weinberger adamw at adamw.org wrote on Tue May 30 14:00:21 UTC 2017:

> poudriere and synth are actively developed

Kevin Oberman rkoberman at gmail.com wrote on Tue May 30 16:52:19 UTC 2017

> I really suggest that you look at synth.

ports-mgmt/synth depends on lang/gcc6-aux which
has lost its maintainer --and is broken for
FreeBSD head after the ino64 changes. (synth
was written in ada --which is not directly
available from the normal lang/gcc* 's.) This
broken status includes amd64 now.

(The lang/gcc6-aux maintainer was also the
author/creator.)

A similar status happened for ports-mgmt/synth
relative to its newly claimed aarch64 support:
lang/gcc6-aux turned out to be broken such that
it would not build on aarch64, which in turn
stopped ports-mgmt/synth builds. . .

ports-mgmt/synth -r437524 (Sun Apr 2) reported:

> ports-mgmt/synth: update 1.68 -> 1.69
> 

> - FreeBSD/ARM* support

but by the time I tried I could not build it
because I could not build lang/gcc6-aux on a
Pine64+ 2GB: head's system headers vs. gcc
munging of copies them were no longer matched
in the bootstrap process that lang/gcc6-aux
uses. This is still true even without
progressing to the ino64 changes in FreeBSD's
head (12-CURRENT).

Unfortunately ports-mgmt/synth suffers from
build prerequisites that do not have a wide
range of contributing maintainers or otherwise
broad support. This looks like it will make
ports-mgmt/synth problematical as things are.

===
Mark Millard
markmi at dsl-only.net