It's certainly true that we're lacking in build hardware for some non-i386 platforms (particularly sparc64), and this made it pretty tricky to build packages for 5.2 on those architectures (a full sparc64 build takes at least a month). I've heard some rumours of donated equipment waiting to be installed, but I don't know what the status of that is.
I've got a SPARC64 box sitting downstairs, waiting for me to install it. Actually, I've got four of them. I was planning on using one for FreeBSD support, one for NetBSD, one for OpenBSD, and one for Solaris. I was also thinking about using the OpenBSD/sparc64 box as a primary firewall (until I can get something better), but I imagine that NetBSD really doesn't need much more sparc64 support right now -- maybe I could reconsider using that one for sparc64 package support.
Likewise, a 5.2 i386 build takes about a week, which means that the freeze *cannot* be shorter than this, even if everything goes perfectly (which, in practise, never happens). This time around, the freeze started on 23 Nov and was lifted on 3 Dec. That's 10 days, which is about as good as you could hope for. If we could build packages in - say - a day, we'd be able to cut the freeze time down further, although I expect the duration would become limited by the speed at which problems can be corrected.
Sounds to me like a reliable RAM disk for temporary files would be very helpful. There are at least one or two PCI card models that I think can take up to 8GB, and which I know work with Linux. If they don't already work with FreeBSD, I would imagine it shouldn't take too much work to fix that.
Every now and then we get offers of access to a machine here or a machine there to help with building packages. The main problem with donating machine resources is that there's limited space in the freebsd.org equipment racks, and the package build system currently needs LAN-equivalent connectivity between the machines. To be useful we'd either need a full cluster of faster machines located somewhere, or to find time to rewrite the build scripts to work efficiently with remote build resources.
Hmm. I would seriously consider donating one or two sparc64 boxes to the project (once I confirm they work ;-), but I would want to make sure that there is space to support them. Otherwise, I would be willing to run them from my basement. Of course, that's precisely the problem you already have.
I've done a bit of script hacking in the past. Do you have any idea what would be required to hack these scripts to suit?
Alternatively, I might be able to get you some additional build resources somewhere else. In fact, I think this other place is probably already quite familiar with FreeBSD, and they might be surprised to hear about this need -- should I contact them?
-- Brad Knowles, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
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