Hi Greg,
Greg Troxel wrote:
Riccardo Mottola <[email protected]> writes:
They were woefully out of date, and we have a policy of only the last
three branches for a slow arch (and 2 for one that can be built in
reasonable time) on the ftp server, because it has finite space, and
running out of space causes all sorts of problems. Generally, contents
of the ftp server are copied to archive.netbsd.org and are available
there.
Ok.. I see... on the other hand it would be fine just keeping "last two
builds" if no new build is there.
sparc had 2024Q4 and sparc64 2024Q3 (but of course also current 2025Q3).
But ok
The larger issue is that nobody within TNF seems to have been doing
pkgsrc builds for sparc since the end of 2024. There's only so much
data center space and electricity available to the people that do this
as a community service. Builds take more than 3 months of full-tilt
computing.
Understandable, on the other hand, externals cannot contribute to
building for security reasons. So it is not an easy situation.
Also consider that especially on more limited systems (almost 32bit
systems) building can be an issue. Memory can be a constraint, so binary
packages are "vital" for a useful system.
In the past I did build a limited set of package (not all): essentially
I saved the binary packages of the packages I built for me. By using
alternatively two systems with a shared NFS it was reasonably doable,
but memory is an issue for certain tools.
I could try pkgsrc-2025Q3 and see how it goes! I install from the
archive and then do a pkg_rolling-replace and will run for some days!
It is probably more reasonable to run it inside an emulator on modern
hardware for continuous service.
If somebody who isn't TNF does e.g. sparc builds: while we won't post
them on our server, we are happy to link to them in a SEE_ALSO file.
For sparc packages on archive:
https://archive.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc-archive/packages/NetBSD/sparc/
and in particular
https://archive.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc-archive/packages/NetBSD/sparc/10.0_2024Q4/
https://archive.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc-archive/packages/NetBSD/sparc/9.0_2023Q3/All/
these are probably exactly what you were pointing to. Mostly that's
just change the pkgin URL s/ftp/archive/ and s/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-archive/.
Yes that is it, at least I can complete the installation I was doing
that was interrupted!
The good news is that there is good coverage of 10/11 for varying
architectures, and also 9 for x86/arm.
However, I see no sparc, even if there are more "retro" 32bit systems
like VAX and m68k!
I'll stir up the topic on the Mailing List and see.
Thanks for now
Riccardo
