Re: Pkgsrc on Mac OS X

[John Ruschmeyer <jruschme%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Tue, 2010-09-21 at 10:10 +0100, Jonathan Perkin wrote:
> * On 2010-09-21 at 03:31 BST, John Ruschmeyer wrote:
> > I have to confess that based on my last few days experiences with building
> > various packages that I'm wondering if it would be of any use to the
> > community to fire up my spare G4 and volunteer to do batch builds.
> 
> Yes please :-)  At the very least it's useful to see which packages are
> broken so that people can fix them.

I gave the pkgsrc guide a quick read yesterday, particularly chapter 7
which deals with bulk builds. Let me see if I got this straight...

I presumably want to build from pkgsrc2010Q2 or whatever is the current
stable release. 

Uploading packages would require me to become a NetBSD developer and, I
assume, meet some other criteria. Is that correct? What is the process
to become a "official" developer? Also, is the infrastructure in place
for bulk package uploads for non-NetBSD packages?

Does one need to be a developer to post to pkgsrc-bulk?

Technical question:

The pkgsrc guide refers to /usr/pkg being removed as part of the bulk
build. Since 'bmake' lives there, does the bulk script re-bootstrap on
every build?

Practical question:

What platform(s) does it make sense to target. I personally have nothing
newer than a G4, so my interests are Tiger (10.4) and, possibly, Panther
(10.3) on PowerPC. I think these represent the cutoff points for most
older Macs. I suspect Tiger is the way to go, but my limited experience
suggests that a few packages break in interesting ways on Panther, so it
might be interesting to support both.

Also, based on the error I see when building Xfixes, it seems like I
really want X11_TYPE=modular to get the newer libraries. Is that
reasonable for a bulk build for public consumption or am I doing a
disservice to not stay with native X libraries?

Thanks. I'm sure I'll have more questions later.

John