[jwhat]

Hi SGI/IRIX'er,

in a act of naivety, I have started to see if I can get FreeBSD Ports working with IRIX to allow building of Open Source software in a repeatable and manageable way.

I have done fork of FreeBSD Ports tree and had a first stab at seeing what would be required to get this to work with IRIX.

As the Port tools are essentially a combination of Makefiles and Shell Scripts this seems to be something that is possible (if you are reasonably proficient with these tools, which most UNIX developers are).

As first step, I have got bmake update to work with IRIX and created a small number of IRIX wrappers for things where there is divergence between IRIX and BSD:
- FreeBSD fetch -> SGI Freeware wget & curl
- FreeBSD env -> mimic FreeBSD env
- FreeBSD pkg -> wrap IRIX inst

Raion, has also done some work previously on this approach, so we have been exchanging notes.

I have setup up gitlab repository here: https://gitlab.com/zebity/freebsd-ports
And github for getting current FreeBSD Ports tree here: https://github.com/zebity/freebsd-ports

The IRIX'ised code is in IRIX-6.5 branch.

This is not yet working and I am now starting to raise issues in gitlab as I find / fix issues.

Possibly another doomed exercise in IRIX software porting ...

But I would like to see if can get some mechanism going that:
- Builds software from current upstream source tree
- Avoids private enclaves, if the software cannot be built on upstream source tree, then manage updates via open git respository and request fixes to be pushed back into upsteam respository.
- Uses standard SGI IRIX build tools (compiler, linker etc as the SGI MIPSpro toolset provide the best MIPS code generation for IRIX ...)
- Doesn't try to make IRIX behave like a Linux distribution (i.e. Debian app, Redhat yum/rpm)

Personally I want to only build 64 Bit SW for MIPS4 architecture, but this is just a "configure" choice that can be managed by user.

Any help from make/shell guru's appreciated.

Just fork, bootstrap basic tools and submit fixes ;-)

The focus here is not to try to get every FreeBSD port working on IRIX, it is just to get the Ports tool chain working.

Cheers from Oz,


jwhat/John