Impact of missing IPv6 support on portstree

[Torsten Zuehlsdorff]

On 06.01.2016 20:51, Mark Felder wrote:
>
> On Wed, Dec 16, 2015, at 03:16, Torsten Zuehlsdorff wrote:
>>
>> In conclusion: if you having an IPv6 only machine, you could not build
>> 69.4 % of the ports.
>
> distcache.freebsd.org is reachable over IPv6. Distfiles should *still*
> be fetchable over IPv6, but I don't know if there are edge cases where
> distfiles aren't cached eg due to the MASTER_SITES being CHEESESHOP
> (pypi), etc.

Therefore i wrote:
"To check if a port is available for IPv6 i excluded the 
distcache.freebsd.org host, because it is not part of the port."

Distcache is part of the infrastructure of FreeBSD. But it is just a 
workaround for missing IPv6 support with a different set of problems and 
requirements.

If i don't use the ports-tree, for example because of building 
development versions i am still hit by this issue.

It is also often a time-issue. If there is a port with a security issue 
i upgrade it immediately. In this case the distfile is normally not in 
distcache.

Yes, we could possibly argue that the impact at the ports-tree is much 
less, because of the distcache-workaround. But it is a workaround and 
not intended to fix the IPv6 issues. It is sponsored and there is no 
guarantee of uptime. This servers can went away anytime.

Also it is just a mask for the basic problem. IPv6 exists for 15 years, 
IPv4 addresses are nearly exhausted and IPv6-only connections increases 
rapidly, while many services are not reachable via IPv6.

Therefore we need more persons to be aware of this problem.

Greetings,
Torsten