[HEADS UP] Platform support

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

[BCC to pkgsrc-users, please keep replies on tech-pkg]

Hi all,
pkgsrc has been used on many different CPU architectures and Operating
Systems over the last 10 years. In my opinion, this is one of the most
important points of developing pkgsrc. Without it, I wouldn't be here
now :-) It also creates a problem though.

When is a platform supported by pkgsrc? This means both a specific CPU
family, but also an entire OS. I don't think there was a good answer so
far beside "someone did a bootstrap once". This is bad as it means
making claims we can't keep up with.

For that reason I want to move to a much stricter and practical rule.
For a platform to be considered supported, it has to receive a minimum
of attention from users or developers. It ought to be possible to know
in advance what will work and what not.

For a platform to be supported, it should at the very least have regular
bulk builds. This can be both the old style mk/bulk as well as the newer
pkgtools/pbulk based build. If a platform can't get at least that much
support, we should not advertise it as supported. I'm not yet sure how
we should name platforms that were supported in the past or have other
reasons for not fulfilling this requirement, but that is a different
issue for now.

Based on that, the following platforms would be supported. This might
not be a complete list, feel free to correct me:

- NetBSD:
  - architectures: i386, amd64, sparc, alpha, powerpc, sparc64
    - irregular: ARM, HPPA
  - versions: 2.0, 2.1, 3.1, 4.0
- DragonFly
- Mac OS X (i386, PowerPC)
- IRIX
- SunOS (5.9, 5.10, sparc and amd64?)

A friend is currently running a build for FreeBSD and hopefully that
will be kept as regular feature. I'm also working on getting a regular
build for AIX.

If you have hardware and time to bulk builds on other platforms not
covered above, feel free to contact me for help on setting up one. Esp.
for older/slower systems, having a number of similiar systems for
parallel builds would be even better.

Joerg