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Date:      Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:10:44 +0100
From:      Anton Shterenlikht <mexas@bristol.ac.uk>
To:        Aldis Berjoza <aldis@bsdroot.lv>, freebsd-ia64@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: New FreeBSD ports system - bachelors work
Message-ID:  <20100430091044.GA14492@mech-cluster241.men.bris.ac.uk>
In-Reply-To: <69c1eb88a6644ad47f93f71b22b6b920@bsdroot.lv>
References:  <69c1eb88a6644ad47f93f71b22b6b920@bsdroot.lv>

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On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 08:08:26PM +0300, Aldis Berjoza wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> Some time ago I've read, that FreeBSD might be interested
> to move ports tree to database (sqlite?).
> This would require rewriting of all existing and writing
> some new tools related to ports.
> 
> 
> I'm IT student and next year I have to write bachelor work.
> As active FreeBSD user, I am very interested in supporting
> FreeBSD, and, if FreeBSD developers, think that such ports
> reimplementation would benefit FreeBSD community, I'd be
> willing to develop new system.
> 
> If you have other ideas, how to improve FreeBSD ports
> please let me know. Currently this is just an idea, but I'm
> also open to other suggestions/ideas.

Aldis, I've a much more interesting, ambitious and challenging
proposal - FreeBSD ia64!

The FreeBSD ia64 port has the potential to be the FreeBSD
HPC solution. But we are not there yet.

Despite being able to run the latest -current with zfs, SMP
and other latest features and successfully building 17559 ports,
FreeBSD ia64 desperately needs motivated and skilled programmers
to work on:

- kernel debugging: the port suffers from spontaneous reboots under heavy load

- building llvm on ia64: http://llvm-ia64.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/llvm-ia64/

- building gcc44 and 45 on ia64: these ports don't build
  at present, and there are lots of other very useful ports
  which depend on gcc44 (or 45).

- optimisation: very little work has been done on this on ia64 so far.
  Work is needed on compiler flags, optimisation of low level (assembly)
  routines, SMP and zfs performance.

See also this list of things to do:

	http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/ia64/todo.html

YOu can check which ports need work here:
http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/packagestats.html

In particular, this page lists ports which failed to build:
	http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/ia64-8-latest/ 

If you look at Aff. (affected) field, you can pick ports
which affect lots of other ports.

Then, of course, there are ports which we aren't even
building on ia64 portcluster:
	http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/ia64-8-latest/duds.verbose

Any work on these is very helpful.

yours
anton

-- 
Anton Shterenlikht
Room 2.6, Queen's Building
Mech Eng Dept
Bristol University
University Walk, Bristol BS8 1TR, UK
Tel: +44 (0)117 331 5944
Fax: +44 (0)117 929 4423



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