Doesn't anything work around here?

[Kris Kennaway]

Christian Baer wrote:
> 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 with the fact that most packages are outdated and I have to build them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.

Have you reported these problems to the maintainers?  If not, why not?

Kris