After some time of looking around on pointyhat and uploading finished packages, it’s time to get my hands dirty and do some real runs. Mark Linimon, who has been running the last couple of runs and sending out the famous “krismails” (emails informing the maintainer/submitter/committer that a port doesn’t work on some combination of architecture and branch), also created some nice scripts that will help analyze the results. Especially the packagestats page is going to be very helpful.

Yesterday, I started the i386-7 build to compare the builds logs to i386-6 and see if any of the work done in -CURRENT has broken any 3rd party software lately. Gabor also finished one of the major parts of his Summer of Code project and sent a patch for DESTDIR support.
This will be tested on 6-exp with DESTDIR unset. This should be a NOOP, but as this is quite an
intrusive change, it does require thorough testing, especially because there might be some edge cases noone would think about. The next step will be another -exp run with DESTDIR set to e.g. /opt. This will probably break a number of ports that try to outsmart the ports infrastructure, and they will need to be fixed individually. We’ll know more in a couple of days when the pointyhat cluster has finished building the ports.