Alpha and broken packages

[Gary Lee Phillips]

While trying to build some ports for the Alpha, I encountered what
seemed an inordinate number of dependencies with the "segment is
greater than 64K" error that brings everything to a halt. While I have
many years of experience as a UNIX admin, I haven't had to write code
for anything much (other than web scripts) since the 1980s.
Consequently, I'm not criticizing anyone for the existence of these
problems, because I can't really offer to help fix them.

Among the ports I couldn't build in 5.7 were xfce4 packages thunar,
xfdesktop, and terminal. Most of xfce4 is still functional without
these, though I will certainly miss the terminal as it's more flexible
(and easier to see) than plain xterm. I'm assuming these are also
problematic in 5.6, so I haven't tried switcing to the older version.

There are still a lot of subscribers on this list, though it seems
pretty quiescent. I'd like to hear recommendations for a usable
web-browser (epiphany wouldn't build, netsurf is slow and crashes
frequently) that is a little less hefty than firefox. I'm also open to
suggestions for other substitutes for xterm that let you control font
size and emulation a bit more. Do abiword, calligra, or libreoffice
build successfully on Alpha?

Is there an easier way to find out which packages are "broken" other
than by trying to build them myself?

Also, does anyone have a Twitter client that can run on Alpha OpenBSD?
I suspect that Turpial might work, as it's written entirely in Python,
but it needs gtk2, which I believe was one of the broken packages I
hit yesterday.

Overall, OpenBSD impresses me on the Alpha. I hope to make better use
of it than I have been able to do with OpenVMS, which is getting
really long in the tooth and has far more critical issues with modern
applications. Linux for the Alphas is also starting to fall behind
pretty quickly.

Thanks for any suggestions or information.

--Gary Phillips (retired librarian and network admin)
[Alpha DS10, Alpha Personal Workstation 433au, and various ARM and
Intel machines]

[Christian Weisgerber]

On 2015-07-27, Gary Lee Phillips <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Do abiword, calligra, or libreoffice build successfully on Alpha?

No.  They aren't even attempted to be built.  Presumably various
dependencies already fail.

> Is there an easier way to find out which packages are "broken" other
> than by trying to build them myself?

Take a look at recent build failure logs:
http://build-failures.rhaalovely.net/alpha/

A lot of these are from the build machines themselves falling over
("Error: job failed 256"), but the actually failing ports are in
there, too.

> but it needs gtk2, which I believe was one of the broken packages I
> hit yesterday.

gtk2 should build.  There's a package for it in the latest snapshot.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          [hidden email]