Announce: Unofficial binary package builds for old releases

[Thomas Mueller]

> 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

Currently building ports from the source, I don't know if I would use these binary packages, but for pkgng, since FreeBSD is pushing users to switch from old-style packages, it might be good to provide pkgng packages for the newer releases of FreeBSD, >= 9.0, maybe not worthwhile on 8.x and earlier.


Tom