Architectures vs the ports tree: a losing battle ? - Marc Espie - EuroBSDcon 2022
Channel: EuroBSDcon
Date: 2022-10-27

Getting 3rd party software to run on lots of architectures is complicated.

This talk will cover most strategies currently used to cope within the OpenBSD ports tree, ranging from specific port issues, like arch-specific atomic operations or intel CPU variations to generic naming/building dependency issues to figure out what to build on a given architecture and to build a maximum number of ports on exotic architectures.

Over the years, we've experienced it all, unfortunately.

These days, we got guidelines for upstream for dealing with actual
binary package creation, as well as tools within the framework related
to declaring specific architectures needs, and dealing with somewhat
lacking dependencies.

There is also the deeper problem of software needing more and more resources to build/run (memory mostly, though cpu time can be an issue) and the necessity of coping with that gracefully, while acknowledging the slow death of less-abled
architectures.