BSDCan2008 - Final - we hope
BSDCan 2008
The Technical BSD Conference
| Speakers | |
|---|---|
|
Mark Linimon |
| Schedule | |
|---|---|
| Day | Talks - 2 (2008-05-17) |
| Room | G |
| Start time | 10:00 |
| Duration | 01:00 |
| Info | |
| ID | 76 |
| Event type | lecture |
| Track | System Administration |
| Language | en |
| Feedback | |
|---|---|
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The State of Packages On FreeBSD
One of the strengths of FreeBSD is the ability to build almost everything from source. In application terms a "port" (Makefile and associated logic) can be used to compile and install directly on a user's machine, or binary "packages" may be created via that process and made available to other users on other machines. However, since most FreeBSD users use ports rather than packages, the state of packages has not kept up.
FreeBSD maintains a "package build cluster" that continually builds package sets for various combinations of the 4 major OS branches and 3 hardware architectures that we support. Reports and statistics are made available based on the error logs and build logs.
This paper will discuss ongoing work to try to answer the following questions:
why aren't more packages available?
why does it take so long for packages to become available?
why do packages get broken?
what steps are taken to fix broken packages?
what is the state of the packages on the amd64 and sparc64 architectures vs. the more common i386 architecture?
what is the state of our package builds over time?