Need help to fix port [Was Re: FreeBSD ports that you maintain which are currently marked broken]

[Fernan Aguero]

Hi!

I'm the maintainer of biology/treeviewx which has been
broken for some time on FreeBSD-5.x.

I'm still using FreeBSD-4.x so I haven't got the means to
test/fix the port (this will change in the future but so far
I have postponed the migration to 5.x, due to lack of time.
Seems like now I should wait for 6.0 :) 

I'm asking for help from someone with access to a FreeBSD 5
box to either work with me in diagnosing the problem and
fixing it or, just providing me with a log of a build
session so I can send it to the original developer. 

As mentioned below, it is quite probable that the issue is
minor and due to the use of a newer gcc, but we should test
this.

Thanks in advance,

Fernan

+----[ linimon at FreeBSD.org <linimon at FreeBSD.org> (12.Oct.2005 03:17):
|
| Dear FreeBSD port maintainer:
| 
| As part of an ongoing effort to reduce the number of problems in the
| FreeBSD ports system, we are attempting to notify maintainers of
| ports that are marked as "broken" in their Makefiles.  In many cases
| these ports are failing to compile on some subset of the FreeBSD
| build environments.  The most common problem is that recent versions
| of -CURRENT include gcc3.4, which is much stricter about such things
| as function declarations, literal strings constants that continue
| over several physical lines, and forcing the deprecation of antique
| header files such as varargs.h (we should now be using stdargs.h).
| 
| The next most common problem is that compiles succeed on the i386
| architecture (e.g. the common Intel PC), but fail on one or more of
| the other architectures due to assumptions about things such as size
| of various types, byte-alignment issues, and so forth.
| 
| In occasional cases we see that the same port may have different
| errors in different build environments.  The script that runs on the
| build cluster uses heuristics to try to 'guess' the error type to
| help you isolate problems, but it is only a rough guide.
| 
| If you need help in one or more build environments that you do not
| have access to, please ask for help on the freebsd-ports mailing
| list.
| 
| One more note: on occasion, there are transient build errors seen
| on the build farm.  Unfortunately, there is not yet any way for this
| algorithm to tell the difference (humans are much, much better at
| this kind of thing.)
| 
| The errors are listed below.  In the case where the same
| problem exists on more than one build environment, the URL points
| to the latest errorlog for that type.  (By 'build environment'
| here we mean 'combination of 4.x/5.x/6.x with target architecture'.)
| 
| (Note: the dates are included to help you to gauge whether or not
| the error still applies to the latest version.  The program
| that generates this report is not yet able to determine this
| automatically.)
| 
| portname:           biology/treeviewx
| broken because:     Does not compile on FreeBSD >= 5.x
| build errors:       none.
| overview:           http://portsmon.FreeBSD.org/portoverview.py?category=biology&portname=treeviewx
| 
| 
| If these errors are ones that you are already aware of, please
| accept our apologies and ignore this message.  On the other hand, if
| you no longer wish to maintain this port (or ports), please reply
| with a message stating that, and accept our thanks for your efforts
| in the past.
| 
| Every effort has been made to make sure that these error reports
| really do correspond to a port that you maintain.  However, due to
| the fact that this is an automated process, it may indeed generate
| false matches.  If one of these errors fits that description,
| please forward this email to the author of this software, Mark
| Linimon <linimon at FreeBSD.org>, so that he can attempt to fix the
| problem in the future.
| 
| Thanks for your efforts to help improve FreeBSD.
| 
|
+----]