On 2014-12-02, Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mott...@libero.it> wrote: > I was pkg_add'ing some essential packages on a freshly installed SPARC > machine. I noticed that several packages are missing. I thought it was > the mirror, but they are missing on the master ftp too. > I know that some packages might not build on sparc or do not have sense > on that platform, however I was looking for pretty general stuff: > libxmsl, libxslt or subversion.
They didn't build. I can't tell whether that's due to the package building process (the sparc build machines are very unstable) or problems with the ports themselves. Peter Hessler may be able to comment. Unfortunately, that's the usual course when an architecture becomes less and less common. Build failures pile up, compounded by slowness and general reliability problems, and the set of available packages keeps shrinking. Somebody needs to care. There is no magic bullet. If, say, two hundred ports fail to build and take out thousands more for which they serve as dependencies, then the only way to fix this is for somebody to sit down and examine and fix the failing ports. One by one. If nobody steps up to do this, then it won't happen. We keep having this tail of zombie architectures. Long obsolete hardware, run by few people, with pitiful "best effort" package builds happening each release and with luck once between. They slowly sink under the accumulating bitrot that nobody cares to fix, but at the same time people can't bring themselves to completely abandon those archs. *shrug* -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber na...@mips.inka.de
