Re: Combining NOT_FOR_* and BROKEN_ON_*

[David Holland <dholland-pkgtech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Thu, Apr 03, 2025 at 10:29:52AM +0100, Jonathan Perkin wrote:
 > "What problem are you actually trying to solve?"
 > 
 > My opinion is that BROKEN* is a solution looking for a problem, and I've
 > yet to hear a reason why having it makes pkgsrc better.

There are a few things that it has been successfully used for in the
past (and in the present):

- packages that build but do not run (e.g. xview on 64-bit platforms)
- packages where the build goes into an infinite loop
- packages where the build takes an unreasonably long time or an
  unreasonable I/O volume before failing

All of these are fairly rare and should be rare. I said up above that
we have a bias against actually using BROKEN; perhaps I should correct
that to say that historically we have, and I think we should continue
to have, such a bias.

We specifically shouldn't use BROKEN for random failures, because
failures caused by interactions with other packages, new compiler
versions, and so forth come and go. I remember a lot of that
particularly with kde packages -- something would break with a new
version of something else, then a while later it would unbreak again
with the next version.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost