Too many binary packages are missing

Ian Smith smithi at nimnet.asn.au
Sun Oct 17 13:36:06 UTC 2010


On Fri, 15 Oct 2010, b. f. wrote:
 > 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

Ah, ta .. hours of fun to be had in there, bookmarked this time.  It 
sure helps toward appreciating the magnitude and scope of the task.

 > > 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.

Just to check that I get it .. for packages-8-stable, an 8.0-RELEASE-p2 
kernel + world is used to _build_ these, is that right?  So they should 
then install fine on any later 8.x system too?

 > > 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.

Ok, I'll bear that in mind for needed packages that 'should' be there.  
I don't mind building lots of stuff from source but the idea of building 
xorg or kde on a 1.1 MHz processor is scary, given using it meanwhile :)

 > > 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.

I vaguely recall a discussion about prioritising 'more popular' package 
building at one stage, but it looks like just keeping up is fun enough.

Thanks for the detail and pointers,

cheers, Ian


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