broken ports

Toomas Aas toomas.aas at raad.tartu.ee
Thu Oct 6 05:13:20 PDT 2005


Reinhard Weismann wrote:

> does anybody know where to report broken ports, or, where to get
> information if/why a port currently is broken. 

 From your description I am not at all sure that the port is broken in 
this case. But since you asked...

If you are sure that the port really is broken, you should first see 
whether somebody has already noted this, by going to 
http://www.freebsd.org/support/bugreports.html and searching for 
existing reports on a particular port. You can also look at the archive 
of freebsd-ports mailing list by going to 
http://www.freebsd.org/search/search.html#mailinglists

FreeBSD has a large and active user community, so real port breakage is 
usually found very fast and by the time you notice it, it's very likely 
that the problem has already been found and even fixed. Cvsupping your 
ports tree and trying to build the port again is often a quick fix to 
port build problems.

If you dont see any existing reports on your problem AND YOU ARE STILL 
SURE THAT IT IS ACTUALLY A PROBLEM WITH THE PORT then it's time to 
submit a bug report at http://www.freebsd.org/support/bugreports.html

> in this case on my 5.4-RELEASE-p6 (i386) installations, the port 
> mail/p5-Mail-SpamAssassin (p5-Mail-SpamAssassin-3.1.0) does not
> compile, i.e. i get 
> [..]
> Segmentation fault (core dumped)
> *** Error code 139
> [..]

Does this happen only to this port? Can you build other ports 
successfully? Can you successfully run 'make buildworld'?

The reason I'm asking is that segmentation faults are often caused by 
failing hardware (faulty memory chip, overheating CPU etc). In your 
case, hardware fault is even more likely since you noticed yourself that 
the port builds successfully on another machine.

-- 
Toomas Aas


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list