Re: Why there are so many binary packages missing?
Allow me an addition, primarily involving your item #1, licensing restriction, extended to possible legal restrictions: Some ports, especially from the multimedia category, allow many build-time options that determine what to include in the final program, mostly used for codecs and file formats. The most famous example is mplayer, which can, due to different options set in Makefile.local (or today's preferred place to put such options), result in many different binary packages. The default options often aren't very usable because most users want to have *all* available codecs and file formats included, but legal restrictions may prohibit using them in certain countries. Of course, it would be possible to provide mplayer in most mainstream option combinations, but if you wanted to cover all possibilities, you'd end up with 2^n packages for n options, and imagine the funny names they would need to have... :-) What I said for mplayer can be carried over to mencoder, and gmplayer and gmencoder as well. I'm sure it furthermore applies for most multimedia players, such as those included in KDE or Gnome. I'd really like to have officially supported binary packages of OpenOffice. In the past, I could pkg_add -r de-openoffice (if I remember correctly), but that's not possible anymore, because the language variant isn't the only option you can set at compile time. -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ... ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Why there are so many binary packages missing?
Yuri y...@rawbw.com writes: Matthew Seaman wrote: Yuri wrote: I am seeing this for a long time. If I use 'portupgrade -aPP' (packages only) there is a very large percentage of packages missing. Upgrading becomes many times faster when binary packages available are available. Missing binary packages are due in the main to three reasons: * Restrictive licensing terms * Ports that through bugs, or otherwise, fail to successfully generate a binary package. Some ports (eg. sysutils/screen up until about 2 months ago (http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/sysutils/screen/Makefile.diff?r1=1.77;r2=1.78)) just won't package successfully, even if they build, install and run perfectly well. * The port has a dependency on another port that failed for reason (2). Because the ports build cluster installs the dependencies of the port it is currently trying to build from binary packages, any lower level port that fails will prevent packages being built for anything that depends on it. Thank you for this information. Let's put aside #1. There are probably very few of those. Several hundred... It still seems strange: on my system all of the ports that I need build ok. Why would the port build successfully, but would fail to generate a binary package? Isn't packaging just gzipping resulting binaries with some minor additions? Pretty much. There are some ports, like the example given, which can be packaged, but won't necessarily work properly when the package is installed on a different system. Ports that depend on system source code (such as kernel modules) are a particularly notable other example. Also why wouldn't the cluster build and install a port, once the package fails? This way the #3 item is eliminated completely. Since it looks like there is much more likely to build a port then a binary package. You can do that; in fact, my home build server does exactly that, using portupgrade. But it's hard to be completely sure that the resulting package isn't legally encumbered by the port it depends on, so I don't make my built packages available to the public. However: the biggest reason people find packages missing is that they're working with the latest ports tree, and the ports cluster hasn't rebuilt the port since it was last updated. pointyhat.freebsd.org is the place to go to find out what's available. In particular, see http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/packagestats.html Good luck. -- Lowell Gilbert, embedded/networking software engineer, Boston area http://be-well.ilk.org/~lowell/ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Why there are so many binary packages missing?
Yuri wrote: I am seeing this for a long time. If I use 'portupgrade -aPP' (packages only) there is a very large percentage of packages missing. Upgrading becomes many times faster when binary packages available are available. Missing binary packages are due in the main to three reasons: * Restrictive licensing terms * Ports that through bugs, or otherwise, fail to successfully generate a binary package. Some ports (eg. sysutils/screen up until about 2 months ago (http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/sysutils/screen/Makefile.diff?r1=1.77;r2=1.78)) just won't package successfully, even if they build, install and run perfectly well. * The port has a dependency on another port that failed for reason (2). Because the ports build cluster installs the dependencies of the port it is currently trying to build from binary packages, any lower level port that fails will prevent packages being built for anything that depends on it. Packages may still be built internal to the build cluster and used to fulfil dependencies although their licensing terms forbid /release/ in compiled form, so (1) doesn't contribute all that much to (3). An awful lot of work by a great many people goes towards minimizing the effects of (2) and that automatically ameliorates (3). There's always more to do though, and anyone volunteering their help will be gratefully received. See http://portsmon.freebsd.org/ for a database of the current statuses. (1) depends on the authors of the package changing their licensing policies; frequently persuading people to do that is an uphill struggle and often requires lobbying by a whole mass of people. Then there are a few oddball packages not built for various other reasons. Eg. building OpenOffice basically ties up too many system resources from the build cluster for too long, so I believe that it is still the case that it is left to 3rd parties to generate and publish packages. Hmmm.. also, just an afterthought and probably insultingly obvious, but where are you fetching the pkgs from? Be aware that the installation media only contain a selection of the most popular packages because there simply isn't space to include everything. Go to the FTP sites for a comprehensive service. Cheers, Matthew -- Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 7 Priory Courtyard Flat 3 PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Ramsgate Kent, CT11 9PW signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Why there are so many binary packages missing?
Matthew Seaman wrote: Yuri wrote: I am seeing this for a long time. If I use 'portupgrade -aPP' (packages only) there is a very large percentage of packages missing. Upgrading becomes many times faster when binary packages available are available. Missing binary packages are due in the main to three reasons: * Restrictive licensing terms * Ports that through bugs, or otherwise, fail to successfully generate a binary package. Some ports (eg. sysutils/screen up until about 2 months ago (http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/sysutils/screen/Makefile.diff?r1=1.77;r2=1.78)) just won't package successfully, even if they build, install and run perfectly well. * The port has a dependency on another port that failed for reason (2). Because the ports build cluster installs the dependencies of the port it is currently trying to build from binary packages, any lower level port that fails will prevent packages being built for anything that depends on it. Thank you for this information. Let's put aside #1. There are probably very few of those. It still seems strange: on my system all of the ports that I need build ok. Why would the port build successfully, but would fail to generate a binary package? Isn't packaging just gzipping resulting binaries with some minor additions? Also why wouldn't the cluster build and install a port, once the package fails? This way the #3 item is eliminated completely. Since it looks like there is much more likely to build a port then a binary package. Yuri ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Why there are so many binary packages missing?
On Tue, 01 Dec 2009 11:47:35 -0800 Yuri y...@rawbw.com wrote: I am seeing this for a long time. If I use 'portupgrade -aPP' (packages only) there is a very large percentage of packages missing. Upgrading becomes many times faster when binary packages available are available. Presumably it's due to version mismatches. If you are using release packages then portupgrade -aPP only works well with the ports tree snapshot on the install disk. If you are using STABLE packages then there's a lag between the port and the packages, the more frequently you update the less likely you are to get matching packages. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Why there are so many binary packages missing on FTP?
On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 1:31 PM, Yuri y...@rawbw.com wrote: /usr/ports/UPDATING recently recommended to upgrade kde-4.1.0 to kde-4-2.0. So I deleted kde-4.1.0 only to find out that there are no binaries for both kde-4.1.0 and kde-4.2.0. So I had to build kde-4.2.0 for many hours, again, only to find out that it doesn't work as well as kde-4.1.0. Desktop Folder applet doesn't show anything for ke-4.1.0. Applets show contents of other folders but there are no scrollbars in them. Also bottom panel doesn't have any colors and looks ugly. So now I a stuck with broken kde-4.2.0 and there is no easy way to go anywhere. I sent similar question to k...@freebsd.org but got no answer. So why kde-4.1.0 and kde-4.2.0 binaries are missing on FTP? And does kde4-4.2.0 work for anybody? Yuri ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org release packages do not get upgraded you either have to go to pointyhat to get newer packages or use a tinderbox to grab packages which kde does not have unlike gnome. oruse-stablepackageswhich seems to not have a complete kde4 built yet ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
