On Thu, Dec 09, 2004 at 12:06:39PM +0100, Zafer Aydogan wrote:
> Salve Mailing List,
> 
> How does NetBSD build all Binary Packages for all Platforms?

by setting up pkgsrc/mk/bulk/build.conf from
pkgsrc/mk/bulk/build.conf.example, and then doing a

	"sh mk/bulk/build"

from the pkgsrc directory.

You'd be advised to do this in a chroot area; for an easy way of
setting one up, investigate pkgsrc/mk/bulk/mksandbox, and if you
want to masquerade as another version of NetBSD, you can have a look
at pkgsrc/pkgtools/libkver.

> In Detail: How much time does it take and what kinda machine does this ?

Well, that depends.

The time taken will depend on how many packages you want to make, and
the speed of the hardware on which you're running the bulk build.

As a datapoint, I run pkgsrc bulk builds on a NetBSD/i386-current
machine.  (The results are posted regularly to the pkgsrc-bulk mailing
list).  The machine itself is a HyperThreaded 2.8 GHz P4, with 2 GB
RAM, and two 120 GB discs made into a single 120 GB RAID1 (wth the
magnificent raidframe, thanks Greg).  A recent bulk build from scratch
took just over 5 days (that didn't include the native openoffice),
with 5200-ish packages in pkgsrc right now.  I expect that the new
pkgsrc-2004Q4 branch will have 5209 packages in it.

Krister does bulk builds for NetBSD/i386 1.6 and 2.0, and also for
NetBSD/amd64.  Jonathan does bulk builds on Solaris machines, and I've
seen results for Linux and IRIX builds too (although none recently,
hint, hint).

> Is there a Cluster like e.g. FreeBSD, used to build ?

Not yet, but distcc works, and there are ideas in various files around
the pkgsrc infrastructure.

Regards,
Alistair