Hello!

> BTW: This is one reason, why I am a little bit sceptic about the pkg
> system. Although there is a package for PostgreSQL, it doesn't work on
> certain architectures. Another example is probably mkisofs, which works
> on e.g. i386, but fails on m68k (unless somebody fixed it recently).

Our mkisofs does work on m68k, in fact for quite some time (since pkgsrc
froze for 1.3.2). AFAIK Ignatios provided and tested the fix.

> Just because a program compiles, it doesn't mean it works. Which leaves
> me with the impression, that some package maintainers have not tested
> their software.

Well, being one of the package maintainers I can only tell that I try my
best to test the packages I commit, but it should be obvious that I
don't have access to all architectures NetBSD supports. Thus it is
pretty possible that a package does not work on a specific architecture
while it works on those tested. Thats were useres like you come in
the game who can use send-pr to report/fix such problems.

> Is it possible to limit a package only to certain architectures?

Yes. In fact several packages already are limited to certain
architectures. We have two variables which can be set in the Makefile:

ONLY_FOR_ARCHS
NOT_FOR_ARCHS

which can be set to a list of architectures. I thought one of those
were already set for postgres as I know it does not work on m68k
systems. Seems this got lost somewhere, I just set NOT_FOR_ARCHS=m68k
in its Makefile.

Btw, currently pkgsrc has a minifreeze, and the package ppl have quite
some afford to compile whole pkgsrc on as many architectures as
possible. So we expect to be more reliable after that freeze.

Greets
-- 
   Name  : Thorsten Frueauf            Milano@irc cri@onaliM       //
   E-Mail: s_frueau@ira.uka.de oder ukfy@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de     \X/