Doesn't anything work around here?

[Christian Baer]

Hello people!

Running FreeBSD on a Sun is slowly becoming quite frustrating. I can live
with the fact that most packages are outdated and I have to build them
myself with the ports. It takes a fair while because the CPUs in the
supported Suns are everything but fast (Sun's fault, not FreeBSD's) and I
have to build all dependencies too (including the build-time ones). No
complaint up to here.

What is *really* frustrating is that several ports don't work at all - or
at least it seems this way. I don't have all that much installed on my
Sun, but here are the packages I wanted to install and couldn't:

- Firefox & Thunderbird (both compile but when started you get a segfault)
- Pidgin -> strange error here: Compiles fine but hangs up when starting
    the program. Because I brought this up on the Pidgin mailing-list,
    I am getting eMails from people with the same problem.
- Keepassx -> Compiles all the required Qt stuff but then doesn't compile
    itself. There is no precompiled package at all for this.

This is a pretty short list, I know, especially when compared to the mass
of ports there are. Considering that I only use a handful of apps on this
machine, it seems a fair amount though.

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.

Why hasn't anyone done that with these (and possibly other) ports yet?
Thunderbird and Firefox have been broken for ages now and each of them
take nearly two days to compile on my Sun (incl. all dependencies) and I
might have saved that time if I had known that they still don't work.

What is the problem? I'm sure that users would be far more understanding
if they knew what doesn't work beforehand and possibly get an explanation
why a certain program won't work.

Regards,
Chris