New FreeBSD ports system - bachelors work

[Aldis Berjoza]

On Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:10:44 +0100, Anton Shterenlikht
<mexas at bristol.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 08:08:26PM +0300, Aldis Berjoza wrote:
>> Hello!
>> 
>> Some time ago I've read, that FreeBSD might be interested
>> to move ports tree to database (sqlite?).
>> This would require rewriting of all existing and writing
>> some new tools related to ports.
>> 
>> 
>> I'm IT student and next year I have to write bachelor work.
>> As active FreeBSD user, I am very interested in supporting
>> FreeBSD, and, if FreeBSD developers, think that such ports
>> reimplementation would benefit FreeBSD community, I'd be
>> willing to develop new system.
>> 
>> If you have other ideas, how to improve FreeBSD ports
>> please let me know. Currently this is just an idea, but I'm
>> also open to other suggestions/ideas.
> 
> Aldis, I've a much more interesting, ambitious and challenging
> proposal - FreeBSD ia64!
> 
> The FreeBSD ia64 port has the potential to be the FreeBSD
> HPC solution. But we are not there yet.
> 
> Despite being able to run the latest -current with zfs, SMP
> and other latest features and successfully building 17559 ports,
> FreeBSD ia64 desperately needs motivated and skilled programmers
> to work on:
> 
> - kernel debugging: the port suffers from spontaneous reboots under
heavy
> load
> 
> - building llvm on ia64:
> http://llvm-ia64.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/llvm-ia64/
> 
> - building gcc44 and 45 on ia64: these ports don't build
>   at present, and there are lots of other very useful ports
>   which depend on gcc44 (or 45).
> 
> - optimisation: very little work has been done on this on ia64 so far.
>   Work is needed on compiler flags, optimisation of low level (assembly)
>   routines, SMP and zfs performance.
> 
> See also this list of things to do:
> 
> 	http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/ia64/todo.html
> 
> YOu can check which ports need work here:
> http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/packagestats.html
> 
> In particular, this page lists ports which failed to build:
> 	http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/ia64-8-latest/ 
> 
> If you look at Aff. (affected) field, you can pick ports
> which affect lots of other ports.
> 
> Then, of course, there are ports which we aren't even
> building on ia64 portcluster:
> 	http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/ia64-8-latest/duds.verbose
> 
> Any work on these is very helpful.
> 
> yours
> anton

Unfortunately I don't have any ia64 pc's to work with.
Running QEMU on my P4 would take ages

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