From owner-freebsd-sparc64@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Oct 22 08:37:46 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 D6FBD16A421 for ; Mon, 22 Oct 2007 08:37:46 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from kris@FreeBSD.org) Received: from weak.local (pointyhat.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::2b]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2AC9C13C491; Mon, 22 Oct 2007 08:37:45 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from kris@FreeBSD.org) Message-ID: <471C6159.3060509@FreeBSD.org> Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2007 10:37:45 +0200 From: Kris Kennaway User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.6 (Macintosh/20070728) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Christian Baer References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: freebsd-sparc64@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 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: Mon, 22 Oct 2007 08:37:46 -0000 Christian Baer wrote: > 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 with the fact that most packages are outdated and I have to build them 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. Have you reported these problems to the maintainers? If not, why not? Kris