Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2007 10:37:45 +0200 From: Kris Kennaway <kris@FreeBSD.org> To: Christian Baer <christian.baer@uni-dortmund.de> Cc: freebsd-sparc64@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Doesn't anything work around here? Message-ID: <471C6159.3060509@FreeBSD.org> In-Reply-To: <ffg2gk$1n1r$1@nermal.rz1.convenimus.net> References: <ffg2gk$1n1r$1@nermal.rz1.convenimus.net>
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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 with the fact that most packages are outdated and I have to build them 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
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