Re: 7+ days of dogfood

Steve Kargl <sgk_at_troutmask.apl.washington.edu> wrote:

> In a long thread started by Peter Wemm on developers_at_, he described
> the move/upgrade of the FreeBSD.org cluster to using FreeBSD-10.  A
> part of his description included the need to test top-of-tree under
> actual real-world conditions.  In his words, FreeBSD should "eat its
> own dogfood."  The new installation on FreeBSD.org, of course, would
> test FreeBSD-10 under (heavy) server load. 

Sounds like an interesting thread, too bad that it happened
behind closed doors.
 
> Unfortunately, trying to build firefox with debugging leads
> reveals a broken port and building chrome with debugging leads
> to a "file system full" issue (because it is a laptop with only
> limited disk space).

I usually build everything (except the known-to-be-broken png)
with debugging and while Firefox indeed seems to crash even
more often than usual the port isn't completely broken for me.
I disable some of the more crash-prone options, though.
The remaining crashes mostly happen upon exit so they are easy
to ignore.

While I have the space to save the core dumps my system is too
slow to conveniently look at them with gdb and I have given up
on Firefox anyway. I intend to deflect to chromium once I find
a more powerful replacement for my current (pun intended) laptop.

> My conclusion:  on at least my not-so-new laptop, FreeBSD-10 can
> be used in a desktop environment if one takes some care during the
> installation.

I'm using CURRENT on my also-no-so-new laptop since FreeBSD 7
(I think) and came to the same conclusion.

It's unfortunate that the builworld time roughly trippled since
2010 but I guess that's progress and a more powerful system
should fix it. I certainly welcome clang in general, though.

Fabian