Re: Why do packages disappear?

Richard Childers <childers@redwoodhodling.com> writes:

> It would be nice if packages didn't disappear and reappear. Can't we
> just save the last successful build?

One can restore old packages via /var/cache/pkg, assuming ABI of
dependencies didn't change. Usually safe on /quarterly but not /latest.

There's no public archive for old packages due to high rebuild churn.
Packages builds automatically start every Tue/Thu/Sat/Sun at 01:00 UTC
and built as a set to ensure ABI between packages is in sync. The amount
of space required to keep old sets would be enormous as FreeBSD supports
several release/architecture tuples at the same time and expensive to
provide on fast mirrors. It's kinda similar to "rolling" distros.

For example, /latest recently updated icu 73 -> 74 which breaks ABI thus
consumers like ungoogled-chromium must be rebuilt to unbreak runtime.
Unfortunately, ungoogled-chromium failed to build for FreeBSD 13.*
due to "extract/timeout" what seems like a temporary hardware issue.

To understand how bumpy /latest builds are compare new Failed (+N)
between Ports columns for "default" (aka /latest) and "quarterly" in
https://pkg-status.freebsd.org/?all=1&type=package&jailname=132amd64