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Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2008 00:20:27 +0100
From: Kris Kennaway <kris@FreeBSD.org>
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Cc: Giorgio Valoti <giorgio_v@mac.com>,
	freebsd-questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: portupgrade: the -P options rarely works
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Kris Kennaway wrote:
> Giorgio Valoti wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> I’ve noticed that using the -P option with portupgrade, which should 
>> try to fetch the binary version of a package rarely works. Most of the 
>> times it tries to fetch the package from the freebsd site, it fails 
>> and then proceed to build it from the sources.
>> While I can expect from to time that a pre-compiled version of a 
>> package to be unavailable, it surprises me to see this so many times.
> 
> We can not guarantee that a given package is available at any given 
> moment, except during release cycles when the tree is frozen.  The 
> continual process of changes and updates mean that from time to time a 
> randomly selected package may not be buildable.  However, taken as a 
> whole, almost all of the packages are available at any given moment. You 
> can check the status for yourself on http://pointyhat.freebsd.org if you 
> like.
> 
> Kris
> 

It is also worth remembering that there are a number of packages 
(including some popular ones) that we cannot distribute for legal 
reasons, due to the restrictive licenses imposed by the authors.  These 
will never be available for download via portupgrade -P.

Kris