Trick: How to get i386-only software via dports

[John Marino]

On 6/6/2013 14:54, Gavin Reade wrote:
> Well here is a tricky one - i'm running i386 DFly 3.4 on a P4 (i586) -
> as reported by dmesg.  Sysinfo reports an i386 proceesor, but I am using
> dports right from the beginning of the install. I've had no trouble
> installing dports on this machine  (not that i've gone mad but - in
> terms of a desktop which is what I'm trying to achieve - everything
> seems Ok so far).  All I've ever done is pkg install [whatever] and it
> has worked.  Funnily enough when I first installed the OS I could not
> install anything with pkgsrc since it kept complaining that the software
> was built for 3.3 not 3.4 (I didn't check the repository date mind you!).
> Anyway as far as dports is concerned I've had no problems.

Great, I'm glad to hear it!
You may have misunderstood the previous post though.  i386 is supported, 
it has a large package repository as you have discovered.

What is missing from that repository are ports that are *only* for the 
i386.  We don't put them in dports.  Any port in dports should (in 
theory) build on both x86-64 and i386.  In practice, a few have errors 
building on i386 and we've got about 80 Haskell ports that don't build 
on i386 due to a known issue with GHC concerning TLS.

What this trick does is enable a regular user such as yourself to try to 
build these i386-only ports on your via by source.  The example I used 
is e3 -- that's not in dports as it is marked i386-only.

Regards,
John