Doesn't anything work around here?

[Daniel Austin MBCS]

Hi,

I'm more than happy to test out ports on sparc64.  I have a few sparc64 
8.0-current machines here.  If some dont work, I may be in a position to 
patch them so that they will - If there's any specific ports that people 
are more interested in, please let me know off list and i'll be happy to 
at least take a peek and possibly come up with some patches.


Thanks,

Daniel.

Mark Linimon wrote:
>> What *really* annoys me about this is that noone has bothered to mark
>> the ports as "not working (yet)". I can remember that a fair while
>> back there was also still a setiathome port in the tree. If you tried
>> anything with that on sparc64 you got a message that it only worked
>> with i386.
> 
> Sorry to come in on this discussion late.  I am behind on email.
> 
> I'm one of the people who goes through the ports and marks them
> broken -- at least on the basis of the build cluster runs.  As of
> the last complete run on sparc64-6, I think I did indeed mark those.
> 
> The latest sparc64-7 run is continuing.  With the limited number of
> sparc64 machines we have, the elapsed time for even _incremental_
> builds is on the order of 3-5 weeks, depending on what's changed in
> the meantime.  Once that gets done, I'll probably do another pass.
> 
> As for ports that compile and install correctly, but just don't work,
> we rely on our user base to file PRs.  But there is a bit of chicken-
> and-egg problem: not many maintainers have access to these machines.
> Much more so than on i386, we are reliant on user fixes.
> 
> I personally think it's still worth putting work into sparc ports,
> if for nothing else the potential for a solid, working, FreeBSD/sun4v
> down the road.  But with the resources we have right now, the priorities
> are: i386, amd64, then sparc64.
> 
> From my intuition from the ports PR statistics, our user base ratio
> is about 25:10:1 for those three.  (Best guess based on the numbers
> from ~6 months ago).