RE: Why NOARCH packages aren't available on all architectures?

Yuri <yuri_at_FreeBSD.org> wrote on
Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2022 01:51:29 UTC :

> When I look at the xsimd package's Fresh ports page 
> https://www.freshports.org/devel/xsimd - it shows that xsimd package is 
> available on some architectures but on others.
> 
> For example it isn't available on FreeBSD:13:armv6.
> 
> 
> Shouldn't packages which are NOARCH be equally available on all 
> architectures?

Part of what is going on is that having a NOARCH end result
can still involve the build using build-environment-ARCH
specific toolchains. NOARCH is only about the end result
--once successfully built.

Ports that have build failures do not have new versions
appear until the build again works. This can lead to
not having any package present for a time until after
the build again works. This can be true even for packages
for NOARCH ports.

One of the forms of "failure" is for the build not being
able to start because something else required has already
failed to build and so was unavailable to use.

As an example with devel/xsimd for target main-armv6 :

http://beefy8.nyi.freebsd.org/build.html?mastername=main-armv6-default&build=p14c9723a310c_sb43b8f8157

(from a build that started on Fri, 22 Jul 2022 03:38:17 GMT) shows
devel/xsimd under Skipped ports (via using the search field):

#	Package	Origin	Reason
16693	xsimd-8.1.0	devel/xsimd	python39-3.9.13

indicating that python39-3.9.13 was required at the time but
it had failed to build, so devel/xsimd also failed to build.

5 days later or so devel/xsimd built just fine, in part because
the python it tried to use at that point had built okay:

http://beefy8.nyi.freebsd.org/build.html?mastername=main-armv6-default&build=p83aeeda2ebb7_s30253da1a9

(from a build that started on Wed, 27 Jul 2022 03:20:23 GMT) shows
a successful devel/xsimd build.

> What causes this not to be the case?

The above notes may be what you are after here, I'm not sure.


===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com