Doesn't anything work around here?

[Mark Linimon]

> What *really* annoys me about this is that noone has bothered to mark
> the ports as "not working (yet)". I can remember that a fair while
> back there was also still a setiathome port in the tree. If you tried
> anything with that on sparc64 you got a message that it only worked
> with i386.

Sorry to come in on this discussion late.  I am behind on email.

I'm one of the people who goes through the ports and marks them
broken -- at least on the basis of the build cluster runs.  As of
the last complete run on sparc64-6, I think I did indeed mark those.

The latest sparc64-7 run is continuing.  With the limited number of
sparc64 machines we have, the elapsed time for even _incremental_
builds is on the order of 3-5 weeks, depending on what's changed in
the meantime.  Once that gets done, I'll probably do another pass.

As for ports that compile and install correctly, but just don't work,
we rely on our user base to file PRs.  But there is a bit of chicken-
and-egg problem: not many maintainers have access to these machines.
Much more so than on i386, we are reliant on user fixes.

I personally think it's still worth putting work into sparc ports,
if for nothing else the potential for a solid, working, FreeBSD/sun4v
down the road.  But with the resources we have right now, the priorities
are: i386, amd64, then sparc64.

From my intuition from the ports PR statistics, our user base ratio
is about 25:10:1 for those three.  (Best guess based on the numbers
from ~6 months ago).

mcl