Pointyhat packages

[oren.almog at gmail.com]

Hello,

I understand that there are many who are not really interested in binary 
packages and are much more happy compiling everything from source but 
for me
this is not a viable option, especially with large ports such as kde, 
gnome, openoffice etc...

For the last couple of days I have been following the pointyhat build 
statistics provided at 
http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/packagestats.html
I was trying to understand how often should I expect updated packages 
for 386-8-stable to hit the ftp sites. As seen on that page, the building
process started on Dec 3rd but had not been completed yet. I've been 
keeping up a rough completion status by following the "not yet built" number
however, that number is standing at 889 for almost 24 hours now while 
the status of the building process is still reported as running (as I am 
writing
this, I just noticed that it is now marked as Not Running but the same 
applies to the i386-7 build which has been stuck at 867 Not Yet Built for
roughly the same amount of time).

As I was watching the building stats for i386-8-stable, a build started 
for amd64-8 that was completed in about 24 hours (I am monitoring this page
manually so times are not exact but are a fair estimate). Why is there 
such a large difference between the build times on amd64 and i386? Are the
i386 machines really that underpowered?

Next I found this page which keeps track on the upload status of 
packages to the various ftp sites 
http://portsmon.freebsd.org/portsuploadstatus.py
If the statistics on that page are correct then it seems to me that 
there is a lot of inefficiency in the build and upload process. Some 
sites are rarely updated
and some poinyhat build runs are never uploaded. Take a look for example 
at the status of amd64-7 and amd64-8 packages: updated packages
were compiled in the last few days (7) and a couple of hours ago (8) but 
it does not reflect at the ftp sites.

Again, I realize that for the majority binary packages are not a high 
priority and that the main purpose of pointyhat is to check for errors 
in the ports
tree. I am also certainly no expert in this and I am learning as I go. 
It's possible that I am misinterpreting the data I am seeing.  I simply 
want to make sense of all this and understand how it all fits together (and
save some compiling time...).

Oren