Among the least-publicized strengths of the FreeBSD development model are users' access to the CVS source tree and the continual QA work being done via onging build processes. The work described in this talk attempts to leverage these strengths to help ease the process of porting, and maintaining, applications for FreeBSD.

There were several automated processes that already existed to provide Quality Assurance (QA) feedback for the ports tree. Each of these processes produces results that are generally posted in HTML format on a regular basis. In addition, there are other sources of information (in particular, the Problem Report (PR) database), which are also suitable for mining information from.

Until the creation of portsmon there was no way to correlate these sources of information in a way that could be browsed by a human. portsmon grabs the HTML pages, parses them, puts them into a database, and allows interactive queries from HTML forms. In addition, it periodically outputs email with the status of ports that have some kind of error.

speaker: Mark Linimon

location: SITE A0150