a few questions about ports

[James Van Artsdalen]

> Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2004 17:44:20 -0400
> From: Murray Patterson <039320p at acadiau.ca>
>   
> I'm trying to get octave, scilab and emacs working for my machine.

The first thing to do is search
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-amd64 and see if someone
else has gotten the port to work.  There is a patch for emacs in
there.

The authors of octave or scilab may know of someone already working
on the issues for AMD64.

If no one has a fix you should probably send the port maintainer a
note describing what happened so they can tag the port as not working
under AMD64.

I did send my emacs changes to the port maintainer but I don't know
if they have appeared yet or not.

As a rule of thumb I look to see if a program runs on Alpha.  If so
then it's likely that most of the tedious work in pointer/int and
varargs has already been done.

PS. "cvsup" is still a problem.  Peter Wemm has one that works in text
mode and you should use it to update you ports tree.  Search the
mailing list archive for the URL for it.