Announce: Unofficial binary package builds for old releases

[Kevin Day]

(cross posting this from hackers by request)


Thanks to poudriere making this easy, we're now making public our (unofficial!) constantly being rebuilt repository of binary packages for old FreeBSD releases and less popular architectures.

See http://ftpmirror.your.org/pub/FreeBSD-Unofficial-Packages for instructions on how to use this.

How do these differ from the official packages?

1) We're building packages for 9.1 all the way back to 7.2.

2) We're constantly grabbing new versions of ports and rebuilding as fast as the builders can go. Our goal is to rebuild the latest version (9.1 right now) in both amd64 and i386 every 24 hours, and all other versions every 7 days.

3) We're leaving up old versions (in the All directory) of everything, so you can grab older versions if we have them.

4) We're building everything twice, one by default and one a special internal-use version that has X11, examples, debugging and a few other features shut off. If the port can't be built without those features, it just gets skipped. (This may not be of use to anyone other than us)

5) We're building packages for i386, amd64, ia64, and have the hardware in house to build for PPC, ARM and sparc64 if anyone asks for it.

(As of this writing, our ia64 box just started building things, and looks like it'll take another 5+ days to finish. If you need ia64, give it a few days.)


Feel free to contact me with any questions, or suggestions for how this might be more useful to you. If you could actually use this on any other release or architecture that isn't currently listed, please let me know. If there's anyone out there that would prefer pkgng instead of the old style packages, we might be able to get those going too. This is primarily for our own internal use so I don't want to add support for a ton of things if nobody is going to use this, so speak up if you want something!


-- Kevin