ports usable or not [was: flowtable usable or not]

[Mark Linimon]

On Fri, Mar 02, 2012 at 03:35:24PM +0100, Nomen Nescio wrote:
> If you use [!i386] you are likely to find problems with ports and
> this gets amplified if you use nonstandard (read stuff not everybody uses)
> ports.

Fair enough.

> I have found several ports broken for many releases in a row.

These are bugs.  Please report them via PRs.

> Other ports aren't supported on certain target architectures but the build
> doesn't tell you that until after it has run for a couple of hours

Those are also bugs.  Please send PRs for those, as well.  I am particularly
concerned about amd64 in this regard (although I am actually only myself
doing the package runs for sparc64 and powerpc).  We continually try to
adjust the metadata for ports to indicate where they will and will not
run, based on the output of pointyhat runs.  (OTOH pointyhat runs the
src tree from "the oldest supported minor release on each branch", so
this may be a clue .)

For those interested in investigating the metadata as seen by these
package build runs, they are available.  For instance:

  http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/amd64-9-latest/duds.verbose

Substitute {i386|sparc64|powerpc} for "amd64" and {7|8} for "9" to
look at the others.

Note that I haven't done any ia64 builds in quite a long time.  Also
note that for sparc64 and powerpc, I no longer try to do 7.  Finally,
we haven't done many runs on 10 yet.

You can see the overall state of the various package builds at:

  http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/packagestats.html

whose "skipped" links will take you to the duds.verbose files.

mcl