a few questions about ports

[Brooks Davis]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2004 at 05:44:20PM -0400, Murray Patterson wrote:
> Hi,  
>
> I'm trying to get octave, scilab and emacs working for my machine.
> I first got them from their respective sites and tried to compile
> and install them for my system, with no success.  Then I tried the
> ports for these: /usr/ports/ math/octave, /usr/ports/math/scilab, and
> /usr/ports/editors/emacs to see if that would work (not expecting any
> success), and these failed.  So I guess the first question is:  Why
> did the 5.2 iso's include those ports to begin with, when they don't
> work (I chose to get the ports collection from CD when I installed
> from CD)?

The ports collection contains ports which worked on at least one of
the 5+ FreeBSD architectures at some time in the past.  There is a
mechanism for marking ports which are currently broken or which only
work on certain platformas, but meta-data like that isn't always up to
date, especialy on platforms like amd-64 which are very new.

> So anyway, I then looked around the freebsd site for ports and came upon:  
>   
> ftp://ftp1.us.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/amd64/packages-5.2-release/  
>   
> and sure enough the ports math/octave, math/scilab, editor/emacs      
> don't exist.  So I'm guessing that becuase this ftp site will always  
> contain the most up-to-date ports for the amd64 architecture (am I    
> right?), then I should just keep looking here to see if a port for    
> any of these programs exists in the future.  If anyone can shed any   
> light on any of these issues it would be great.                       

This URL represents a snapshot of ports which built at release time.  It
will not change (except to be deleted in another couple releases).

In theory, working ports will eventually result in packages appearing
in:

ftp://ftp1.us.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/amd64/packages-5-current/

or later .../packages-5-stable/

but I'm not sure what the rate at which they will be built is.  They
also won't work until someone who cares about them figures out what is
wrong and fixes them.  This ranges from trivial to extreamly difficult.

-- Brooks

--
Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
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