"stable" ports?

[Garrett Cooper]

On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 12:49 PM, Ivan Voras <ivoras at freebsd.org> wrote:
> Doug Hardie wrote:
>>
>> On 29 March 2010, at 08:57, Ivan Voras wrote:
>>
>>> In some cases the burdens are obvious - the maintainer(s) would need to
>>> e.g. maintain three versions of the ports - a random example would be
>>> e.g. X.Org 7.0 for 6.x, 7.2 for 7.x and 7.4 for 8.x. Another would be
>>> keeping PHP 5.2 for 7.x and 8.x and having 5.3 in the future
>>> (CURRENT/9.x) branch.
>>
>> I am a bit concerned about your concept of maintain, being able to build a
>> port successfully, does not necessarily mean it will work properly.  For
>> example, qpopper (which I maintain) has an issue where one feature does not
>> work properly on 64 bit machines where it works fine on 32 bit machines.  In
>> addition, there are a number of other machine types that are currently not
>> heavily used but might become so in the future.  Thats a lot of different
>> combinations of hardware and OSs to keep running for the maintainers.
>
> It was done (in Linux), hence it can be done. If all else fails and both the
> project and the maintainer cannot find suitable build and test machines, I'd
> suggest using ONLY_FOR_ARCHS, or doing the whole "stable" dance only for
> Tier 1 platforms (enumerated in
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/committers-guide/archs.html to be
> i386, amd64, pc98). AFAIK from the ports POW, pc98 and i386 are too close to
> be considered separately.
>
> Virtualization (VirtualBox) may help maintainers test on the architecture
> they don't run natively.

    Virtualbox only runs x86-compatible platforms:

An x86 virtualization software package developed by Sun Microsystems.
Distributed under either the GNU GPL or a proprietary license with
additional ...

    That would leave arm, ia64, mips, powerpc, and sparc64 out in the
cold. Maybe folks should try qemu (despite the fact that it's a
buggy-ish emulator?):

>From <http://wiki.qemu.org/download/qemu-doc.html>:

For system emulation, the following hardware targets are supported:

    * PC (x86 or x86_64 processor)
    * ISA PC (old style PC without PCI bus)
    * PREP (PowerPC processor)
    * G3 Beige PowerMac (PowerPC processor)
    * Mac99 PowerMac (PowerPC processor, in progress)
    * Sun4m/Sun4c/Sun4d (32-bit Sparc processor)
    * Sun4u/Sun4v (64-bit Sparc processor, in progress)
    * Malta board (32-bit and 64-bit MIPS processors)
    * MIPS Magnum (64-bit MIPS processor)
    * ARM Integrator/CP (ARM)
    * ARM Versatile baseboard (ARM)
    * ARM RealView Emulation/Platform baseboard (ARM)
    * Spitz, Akita, Borzoi, Terrier and Tosa PDAs (PXA270 processor)
    * Luminary Micro LM3S811EVB (ARM Cortex-M3)
    * Luminary Micro LM3S6965EVB (ARM Cortex-M3)
    * Freescale MCF5208EVB (ColdFire V2).
    * Arnewsh MCF5206 evaluation board (ColdFire V2).
    * Palm Tungsten|E PDA (OMAP310 processor)
    * N800 and N810 tablets (OMAP2420 processor)
    * MusicPal (MV88W8618 ARM processor)
    * Gumstix "Connex" and "Verdex" motherboards (PXA255/270).
    * Siemens SX1 smartphone (OMAP310 processor)
    * Syborg SVP base model (ARM Cortex-A8).
    * AXIS-Devboard88 (CRISv32 ETRAX-FS).
    * Petalogix Spartan 3aDSP1800 MMU ref design (MicroBlaze).

Thanks,
-Garrett