Too many binary packages are missing

b. f. bf1783 at googlemail.com
Fri Oct 15 16:39:57 UTC 2010


On 10/15/10, Ian Smith <smithi at nimnet.asn.au> wrote:
...

>
> http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-8-stable works,
> it's what portupgrade looks at on an 8.1-STABLE system, but it's a bit
> sad finding the last directory updated at 1st October.  I checked just
> one subdir, sysutils, and the newest file there is 30th September.

http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/packagestats.html
http://portsmon.FreeBSD.org/portsuploadstatus.py

...

> Er, 8-STABLE (packages) is for currently 8.1-STABLE (world/kernel), no?

No.  I thought the 8-STABLE packages were from a recent snapshot of
8-STABLE, because that's the way that tinderboxes are set up.
However, I checked, and actually a version of the last supported
stable branch of 6.*, and some versions of the _oldest_ supported
stable branches of 7,8 are used. Right now, for i386 it's:

6.x-stable --> 6.4-RELEASE-p9
7.x-stable --> 7.1-RELEASE-p12
8.x-stable --> 8.0-RELEASE-p2
9.x-current --> a snaphot of 9-CURRENT

Other architectures may use slightly different versions.  This is an
attempt to build packages that work on the all stable branches of all
supported releases, although obviously this may occasionally fail.

...

> There does seem to be more delay in building Latest/ packages lately,
> compared to a couple of years ago.  I did a huge portupgrade -aFPP back
> on Sep 13 (about 450 packages since 8.0-R, 850MB incl xorg etc) but
> didn't get to upgrading then (record wettest September, solar power,
> broken backup generator, long story :) but did another to catch up on
> Sep 19, which found some more packages updated between those dates,
> however looking at the (preserved by fetch) dates these packages were
> built, it's clear that building (eg here for 8-stable i386) is done in
> batches that run for several hours, but are only done several times per
> month, at best.

On some architectures, the building seems to be done more often than
the uploading to the ftp server.  (Perhaps some of these are
incomplete builds.) So in some cases you can actually get more recent
packages directly from pointyhat, but I think that they are only
intended for testing purposes, and not for mass distribution.  Pav
told me that he uploads amd64 packages within 24 hours of the
completion of a build, although it takes further time for them to
propagate to the mirrors.

> eg, I got large batches all dated:
>
>  May 27-28 (about 40)
>  Jun 13 (plus a few Jun 14 and 15, couple on Jul 9, then not till ..)
>  Jul 23, 24, 25 (about a dozen)
>  Jul 28 (about 120)
>  Jul 29, Aug 9, 10 (half a dozen)
>  Aug 15, 16 (about 80)
>  Aug 21, plus a few more Aug 22, 24 (about 100, then none till ..)
>  Sep 8, 9, 10 (about 60)
>
> And as mentioned above, some on Sep 30 I haven't got yet, nothing since.
>
> So it's a bit spasmodic and irregular, and there are gaps of up to
> several weeks between, leading to potential for quite a few out of date
> major packages (in my case including php5 and all of kde3)
>
> The last time I noticed such big delays between updated ports and their
> packages (IIRC, 2007) Kris Kennaway put in a successful word to someone
> .. who should we be bugging these days?

portmgr@ -- I think linimon@, pav@, and a few others are in charge of
the package-building machines.  On some architectures (e.g., ia64,
powerpc and sparc64), I think that the paucity of available hardware
limits the frequency of the builds, but I'm not sure about i386.  The
available logs show that the last builds for 8.x-stable i386 were on:

20100804
20100808
20100815
20100820
20100821
20100823
20100908
20100927
20101007

I don't know the rationale behind the schedule, although I heard that
some work was recently being done on parts of the cluster, and that
some exp-runs were made.

b.


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