From: Stuart Henderson <stu@spacehopper.org>
Subject: Re: Question RE: Failed bulk build standard practice
To: George Koehler <kernigh@gmail.com>
Cc: izder456 via ports <ports@openbsd.org>
Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2024 09:34:10 +0000

On 2024/03/19 01:55, George Koehler wrote:
> On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 11:56:31 -0500
> "izder456 via ports" <ports@openbsd.org> wrote:
> 
> > I take MAINTAINER on several ports with no ONLY_FOR_ARCH set.
> > When looking through the bulk build reports in the ports@ lists this
> > morning, I saw that some ports I worked on have failed on hardware I
> > don't have access too.
> > 
> > Is there a special practice we do when this occurrs, or is the port
> > just never built into binary at release for that arch?
> 
> We have a few ports that fail in every bulk (on some arch) and just
> never become packages.
> 
> We have both ONLY_FOR_ARCHS and BROKEN-<arch>.  For example, lang/ldc
> has ONLY_FOR_ARCHS = amd64, and lang/gambit has BROKEN-riscv64 (so
> everything but riscv64 tries to build gambit).  I see that gambit
> failed on powerpc, so I might want to add BROKEN-powerpc.

Generally, ONLY_FOR_ARCHS is normally for when the software by design
targets only targets specific archs, or when it depends on something
only available on limited archs, whereas BROKEN-$arch is for when
it's, well, broken, and is unlikely to work without changes to the
port. Mostly that is done to 1) save time in bulk builds and 2) flag
that it's broken so that somebody doing builds doesn't need to keep
re-checking to see why it failed.

> Some ports never get fixed on some archs, because too few people use
> the port, and none of them run the failed arch.
> --gkoehler
>