Re: [head tinderbox] failure on arm/arm

from Brett <brett.mahar_at_gmx.com>:

> Just an observation: a few years ago when I got sick of Linux's "headlong rush" development model, I subscribed to various BSD mailing lists to see what
> +else was out there. I considered FreeBSD at the time - there was a neverending avalanche of "[head tinderbox] failure" messages. This told me that I would
> +be more likely to be running code written by people who knew what they were doing if I went with Open, Net, or DragonflyBSD.

> I safely run OpenBSD-current on my main computer and it always works (I think I have had 2-3 build problems in about 3 years, and they were all my fault).
> At the moment, I only feel confident enough with FreeBSD-current to run it on my unimportant torrent computer. This is 80% due to constant build failures,
> and 20% due to invasive changes being introduced with documentation/instructions scattered over many different pages and mailing lists, e.g:

> http://wiki.freebsd.org/FrontPage?action=fullsearch&context=180&value=xorg&titlesearch=Titles

> http://wiki.freebsd.org/FrontPage?action=fullsearch&context=180&value=pkgng&titlesearch=Titles

> Hypothetical user: "Is it WITHOUT_PKGNG= or WITHOUT_PKGNG=yes or WITH_PKGNG=no today?"

> I wonder how many other people that you never hear from feel the same, and if some sort of "x weeks commit freezeout" should apply to the build breakers.
> Cute pointy hats or whatever obviously have no effect.

> Rant over!

I too had monstrous problems rebuilding all ports that depend on png.

But I am not really satisfied with the other BSDs.  

NetBSD is hit-or-miss to build successfully, more miss than hit.  NetBSD supports GPT awkwardly but has no support for USB 3.0.

NetBSD is rather unstable.  I think I'd trust FreeBSD-current over a stable or release version of NetBSD.

How does OpenBSD compare in that regard?

I think DragonFlyBSD just introduced USB 3.0 support in 3.2.1, but that is off by default.

There are live USB images available for DragonflyBSD from www.dragonflybsd.org, 
and live USB images available for OpenBSD at liveusb-openbsd.sourceforge.net .

I'd like to try, just to see what they look like and how or if they support my hardware.


Tom