From owner-freebsd-sparc64@FreeBSD.ORG Sun Oct 21 17:43:37 2007 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-sparc64@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 77AC216A419 for ; Sun, 21 Oct 2007 17:43:37 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from news@nermal.rz1.convenimus.net) Received: from mx2.netclusive.de (mx2.netclusive.de [89.110.132.132]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 22E3013C4A5 for ; Sun, 21 Oct 2007 17:43:36 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from news@nermal.rz1.convenimus.net) Received: from nermal.rz1.convenimus.net (Fdc1d.f.ppp-pool.de [195.4.220.29]) (Authenticated sender: ncf1534p2) by mx2.netclusive.de (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9833A2604C8 for ; Sun, 21 Oct 2007 19:43:28 +0200 (CEST) Received: by nermal.rz1.convenimus.net (Postfix, from userid 8) id 5CC4315217; Sun, 21 Oct 2007 19:33:08 +0200 (CEST) To: freebsd-sparc64@freebsd.org Path: not-for-mail From: Christian Baer Newsgroups: gmane.os.freebsd.devel.sparc Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2007 19:33:08 +0200 (CEST) Organization: Convenimus Projekt Lines: 40 Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: sunny.rz1.convenimus.net X-Trace: nermal.rz1.convenimus.net 1192987988 56379 192.168.100.5 (21 Oct 2007 17:33:08 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@convenimus.net NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2007 17:33:08 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: slrn/0.9.8.1 (FreeBSD/6.2-RELEASE-p8 (sparc64)) Subject: Doesn't anything work around here? X-BeenThere: freebsd-sparc64@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting FreeBSD to the Sparc List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2007 17:43:37 -0000 Hello people! Running FreeBSD on a Sun is slowly becoming quite frustrating. I can live with the fact that most packages are outdated and I have to build them myself with the ports. It takes a fair while because the CPUs in the supported Suns are everything but fast (Sun's fault, not FreeBSD's) and I have to build all dependencies too (including the build-time ones). No complaint up to here. What is *really* frustrating is that several ports don't work at all - or at least it seems this way. I don't have all that much installed on my Sun, but here are the packages I wanted to install and couldn't: - Firefox & Thunderbird (both compile but when started you get a segfault) - Pidgin -> strange error here: Compiles fine but hangs up when starting the program. Because I brought this up on the Pidgin mailing-list, I am getting eMails from people with the same problem. - Keepassx -> Compiles all the required Qt stuff but then doesn't compile itself. There is no precompiled package at all for this. This is a pretty short list, I know, especially when compared to the mass of ports there are. Considering that I only use a handful of apps on this machine, it seems a fair amount though. What *really* annoys me about this is that noone has bothered to mark the ports as "not working (yet)". I can remember that a fair while back there was also still a setiathome port in the tree. If you tried anything with that on sparc64 you got a message that it only worked with i386. Why hasn't anyone done that with these (and possibly other) ports yet? Thunderbird and Firefox have been broken for ages now and each of them take nearly two days to compile on my Sun (incl. all dependencies) and I might have saved that time if I had known that they still don't work. What is the problem? I'm sure that users would be far more understanding if they knew what doesn't work beforehand and possibly get an explanation why a certain program won't work. Regards, Chris