Compiling ports in a post-9.0-RELEASE world

[Ade Lovett]

On Mar 16, 2011, at 05:45 , Konstantin Tokarev wrote:
> 16.03.2011, 13:33, "Ade Lovett" <ade at FreeBSD.org>:
>> On Mar 16, 2011, at 04:39 , Anton Shterenlikht wrote:
>> 
>>>  What will happen to ports in non-clang arches (sparc64, ia64) after 9.0R?
>> 
>> With any luck, they will die a silent death and be pointed in the direction of NetBSD that likes to look after irrelevant architectures.  i386/amd64 for primary use, arm/mips for embedded.  Anything else is just ridiculous.
> 
> What about Power Architecrure (formerly PowerPC)? 
> It's widely used both for embedded and enterprise (pSeries, Blue Gene, etc.)

Surprisingly enough, there is an _enormous_ difference between making FreeBSD/src run on a particular platform (which is pretty much self-contained), and then making FreeBSD (src+22,000 ports) run on a particular platform (which isn't).

Let's take the embedded example at random (well, not so much, since we both brought it up).  Forcibly define WITHOUT_X11 on those platforms -- that'll nuke a whole bunch of stuff.  That's the low hanging fruit.  In fact, it may well be easier to define ONLY_FOR_ARCHES?= i386 amd64 in bsd.port.mk and then _override_ it for those few ports, and dependencies, that actually make sense on an embedded system.

With 9.0-RELEASE, as far as ports/packages go, we'll be back to trying to support 4 major releases (7.4, 8.2, 9.0)-STABLE, 9.1-CURRENT (or will it be 10.0), two fundamentally different compilers (between 7.x/8.x and 9.0), eleventy-billion ports, with perhaps 2 people in the entire universe wanting to run doxygen on a mips box.

Enough is enough.

-aDe