The official release of the FreeBSD ports monitoring system

[Mark Linimon]

Many of you are aware that for some time I've been working on
creating a set of HTML reports that allow for data-mining the
FreeBSD Problem Reports and the bento port build errorlogs.
Thanks to the loan of a machine from Will Andrews (thanks Will),
there is now a machine with reasonable bandwidth that is
totally dedicated to this function, located at:
<a href="http://portsmon.firepipe.net">portsmon.firepipe.net</a>.

The reports are intendend to be a way for general users, as
well as ports maintainers and committers, to be able to work
with information about ports, without having to go through
repetetive searches amongst GNATS and the bento errorlogs
themselves.  In addition, links are provided that can take
you directly to the CVS web pages in addition to each PR
or errorlog.  The reports are currently updated once an hour.
The development version of this code has been running on
my home machine for quite some time and (despite the usual
bugs) is quite stable.

At the top of the index page, you'll find a link to a brief
set of FAQs that try to answer the expected questions.  However,
if you have other questions or suggestions, please feel free
to email me, either at this address, or at lonesome.com or
FreeBSD.org, and I'll try to answer them.

My goal in creating these reports is to try to get the best
possible results out of our existing ports infrastructure for
as many people as possible.  It's been a very interesting
learning experience all the way.

I'm looking forward to hearing feedback from a wider
community now.

Mark Linimon