Re: building a 14.1 workstation

Kevin Oberman wrote:
> Bob Proulx wrote:
> > The build might take several days to complete.  The result is that the
> > pkg repositories both current and quarterly might be missing major
> > cones of dependent packages such as recently both firefox and chromium
> > were unavailable for several days.
>
> This is no longer the case for 14 for amd64 systems. The 140amd64 build
> system can now do a full build of packages in about 34 hours, well under 2
> days, and most smaller builds run in a few hours. They do 42 parallel
> builds. This is a huge improvement and, I believe, that other build systems
> will be replaced over the next months to get similar performance. Since I
> have always used "latest", I have no idea of the status of the quarterly
> builders.

So glad to hear about the auto-build improvements!  That's awesome!

This is a huge improvement!  I have a datapoint from 2023-11-09 where
after 27 hours the build was reporting 28% done at that time last
year.  At that time I was waiting for a fixed sudo to build and for
reasons at the time it was not in the current build and I was waiting
for it to finish and then start the NEXT build's version for the fix.
Which was quite the wait.  I use Quarterly.  Just to give an example
of how much a 34 hour build is an improvement over the previous. :-)

However even if faster there is still a window of time when some ports
such as firefox and chromium are not available when there is a port
build fail such as x265 which recently failed to build.  It's very
good to hear that the gap is a smaller gap.  But it's still a gap and
people still hit the gap if they try to install a fresh system during
that time.   Due to the nature of things a headless server is almost
always okay but a desktop with X and a web browser and vlc is always
more likely to be the problem.

> Some time I want to walk through all of the build systems and see how many
> hare running on new metal. Unfortunately, pkg-status.freebsd.org still is
> not talking to the new systems.

Let me cheer you on with this endeavor! :-)

I have been trying to skill myself up to read the auto-build logs more
proficiently.  A few other people have helped to teach me some hints
about how to read them which has been very helpful.

For example my own home networking situation is currently still IPv4
only.  (Yes, I know, in 2024.)  Yet some of the auto-build network is
stitched together using only IPv6 DNS names.  It's possible to
carefully navigate around it using IPv4 only but it is more
challenging.  Sometimes I simply decide to wait a couple of days
knowing that eventually everything will work out.

Bob