ports missing their packages.

[andrew clarke]

On Wed 2008-10-29 04:10:33 UTC-0700, freebsd at t41t.com (freebsd at t41t.com) wrote:

> I'm not sure I got all the emails in this thread... maybe some just
> haven't arrived yet.

It began on freebsd-ports, then the OP started cross-posting to
-questions, so I moved my replies to -questions.

> Anyway... I, for one, depend on packages. It literally takes days to 
> build something like Firefox on my (admittedly old) computer. I'm 
> surprised that package creation is such a low priority. Are there so 
> few people running FreeBSD on old hardware?

Well, FF eats memory.  Just running it on something older than that is
not going to be a pleasant experience.  I imagine most people using
Firefox are probably using fairly modern hardware, built within the
last 4 years or so.  

I built Firefox from ports on a 5 year old 1.6 GHz PC running 7.0-REL
in 256 Mb RAM.  It certainly didn't take _days_ to build.  From memory
I ran it overnight and it was done in the morning.  I would've killed
the build if it was still running when I woke up.

Anyway, Firefox is a pretty complicated piece of software.  Most ports
don't take anything like that long to build.  In any case, there are
packages of Firefox available, so it's not as bad as you make out!

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-6-stable/www/firefox-2.0.0.17,1.tbz
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-6-stable/www/firefox-3.0.3,1.tbz

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-7-stable/www/firefox-2.0.0.17,1.tbz
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-7-stable/www/firefox-3.0.3,1.tbz