On 12/3/14, Christian Weisgerber <na...@mips.inka.de> wrote: > 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*
how do you guys deal with disk space with sparc machines? NFS? I will dust off my ss20 this weekend see if it powers up. --patrick
