reintro and pkgng aghastness

[Jacob Ritorto]

Hi,
  I'd been away from FreeBSD for fifteen years, but I'm back and I'm
pleased to announce that I'm using a computer that's from around the time I
left FreeBSD :)  It's a nice little Sun Ultra 5.  Bone stock; doesn't even
look like the case has ever been open. I recently had to stop using Solaris
because they're became evil and Illumos because they're kind of not
supporting this hardware anymore.  I tried OpenBSD, but its applications
just crashed.  So here I pragmatically am.

  I like FreeBSD.  I didn't leave out of disgust or anything; mostly just
employment being all-Sun years ago.  So it's cool revisiting it and seeing
all the changes and all the stayed-the-sames.

  I'm pretty exited about the new FreeBSD pkgng system.  I had the extreme
pleasure of using it whilst installing my SPARC last night (which,
unfortunately, took from mid evening until around 4:30 in the morning. (I
didn't have any cds or floppies at my disposal, so I instead built the
network / diskless system installl on a virtualbox vm on my Mac and
installed FreeBSD to the SPARC from there).  Good old rarp/boopt/tftp/nfs!
Reminded me of Sun Jumpstart!  I was really pleased that this way of doing
things still works on FreeBSD  Truly a slick and smart design.

  But is it true that I can't actually use pkgng on my real computer
because It's not a PC?

  I've been looking around the Internet for some hours, now, to no avail.
Are there seriously *no* package repos for SPARC?

  If that's the case, I'd like to help remedy it.  I've read around on how
to contribute, but it seems none of what's out there pertains to pkgng for
sparc.

  Please let me know if I'm understanding the situation right and how I can
help, if help is wanted.  I have a lot of SPARCs and they need a
trustworthy operating system with software package system that doesn't have
to be manually-wrought.

"Oh, wow, it just finished its five-plus-hour ports build of freaking tmux!"
jake