Re: Testing pkgsrc builds & dependencies

[nia <nia%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 12:43:47PM -0700, Gordon Zaft wrote:
> (Apologies if this is not the right list for this)
> 
> I've been using NetBSD and pkgsrc for a long time, and I now have a
> (little) spare time and a spare server that's not doing anything, so I
> thought I would teach myself some tools by setting up a pkgsrc build/test
> machine.
> 
> The specific goal is to build pkgsrc packages from source in isolation (not
> in bulk) to ferret out problems with dependencies that I (and I'm sure
> others) have often found.

I would really recommend using pbulk (specifically doing limited bulk
builds if you don't want to build every package). Why? Because if you
don't, you'll have many packages left over from earlier builds of
dependencies which will cause some missing dependency errors to
never be caught.

Single-worker pbulk will waste a lot of time doing steps sequentially
when it could be constantly burning CPU, so I strongly recommend using
multiple parallel chroots. I have some scripts to simplify setting up
many-chroot bulk builds on NetBSD:

https://github.com/alarixnia/bulkbuild-scripts

Currently I am building pkgsrc current for netbsd current and NetBSD 9
on i386 and amd64. I am not doing things like using modular X11, which
would catch even more problems with missing dependencies.