Re: State of pkgsrc

["Dr. Thomas Orgis" <thomas.orgis%uni-hamburg.de@localhost>]

Am Fri, 7 Mar 2025 10:43:15 -0600
schrieb Jason Bacon <jtocino%gmx.com@localhost>:

> It's far from dead at this moment, but I worry about its future if the 
> community doesn't embrace some strict QA measures.  I'd actually go a 
> step further than the dreckly CI, and require testing of direct 
> dependent packages as well.  That's resource-intensive,

> The quarterly branches 
> were the only thing that made pkgsrc viable for scientific computing on 
> Mac and Linux.  And as Jonathan has tried hard to convey, the "break 
> things for 3 months and fix it all in a week" model isn't sustainable.

We run pkgsrc in our HPC environment and the time-consuming process of
fixing up broken things even with quarterly releases has prevented me
from giving timely updates to users. Twice a year would be a goal.

Compute resources are not the issue for me, as running some builds is
small scale compared to other computing jobs, and using the university
resources is justified as it is about ensuring working software for our
users.

I guess it makes sense that I participate in future efforts for CI
builds on our HPC systems (>100 nodes, 192 cores each). This would be
Linux x86-64, NetBSD maybe via qemu VMs, I guess. I intend to test my
own build process with our external toolchains, but I should be able to
set up some automated builds as jobs in our batch system. Personal time
is the main constraint. When I have a place to push results to, I hope
the project could benefit, too.

What's the current estimate for a bulk build on how many CPU cores …
and how far does it scale in parallel? I wonder at what interval I
could schedule full builds.


Alrighty then,

Thomas

-- 
Dr. Thomas Orgis
HPC @ Universität Hamburg