On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 08:19:31PM -0400, Robert Mohr wrote:
> learned a lot about the pkgsrc system in the process.  There were no
> pre-built binaries for desktop GUI applications like KDE or GNOME for
> either the DECStation or SPARCStation, so I dove into building the
> applications from source.  It's at this point that the marriage began
> to hit rocky times.

even if you had gotten them to build, you still might not've been happy
with their usability due to bloat.  running gnome on a 24MB 16MHz
decstation 3100 would be an exercise in extremely patient insanity.
(even given a 5000-series stuffed with RAM it still might not be much
fun.)

> Currently I'm about a week into the current build attempt, having
> successfully gotten past a failure in the mozilla-gtk2 build by
> installing gcc34-3.4.2 and retargeting the Makefile to make use of
> this compiler (although not listed as a dependency, at some point in
> the overall meta-pkgs/gnome build process, gcc-2.95.3nb5 was installed
> which seemed to have broken the toolchain).

I've been burned by this in the past on my 1.6.2-running i386 box(es)
somewhere in gnome-land.  I was using GCC_REQD=3.3 but some of the
requisite libraries for gnome were compiled with an older version of
gcc.  straight C code will link across compiler versions without
problems, but the ABI for C++ changed between 2.95 and 3.3 causing all
sorts of confusion until I figured out what was happening.  I ended up
having to rewind through the dependencies and make sure all the C++
libraries were rebuilt with the same compiler.

> Finally, getting to the point, I am wondering what success other users
> have had with building large packages, meta or otherwise from current
> pkgsrc.  If nobody has ever built GNOME for SPARC (I find this hard to
> believe), have other multi-package builds such as KDE, SUSE, XORG, or
> edesktop been successfully built?  It's entirely possible that I'm
> doing something wrong, although I have spent a lot of time reading the
> pkgsrc documentation, as well as man-pages for the various built-in
> package tools as well as a number of the pkgtools add-ons.

I've built fairly complicated stuff for my sparcs, including mozilla,
which pulled in all the gnome/gtk stuff.  I remember some troubles
around libiconv, but was able to resolve them.

> Hoping to renew vows and get on with the successful marriage,

your persistance is appreciated, and WILL pay off in increased knowledge
of the system you run, as well as better troubleshooting skills.

or you could just give up and run /i386 like the rest of the world...

-- 
  Aaron J. Grier | "Not your ordinary poofy goof." | agrier@poofygoof.com
  "someday the industry will have throbbing frontal lobes and will be able
  to write provably correct software.  also, I want a pony." -- Zach Brown