I know we have a caching problem. I suspect I know the cause.
The symptoms of the problem are:

a commit has been processed by the system.
the commit can be viewed via the URL /commit.php?message_id=MESSAGEID
the commit can be seen via index.php or date.php
the commit cannot be view on the port page

I think I found the cause of […]

Florent Thoumie mentioned today that FreshPorts should not supply package installation instructions for Restricted ports. Why? This extract from /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.port.mk indicates why
# RESTRICTED - Prevent the distribution of distfiles and packages to
# […]

Shaun Amott wrote in to tell me of a bug with the /usr/ports/UPDATING code. FreshPorts parses this file each time it is committed and loads the data into a table. When a port is displayed, any notes from UPDATING are displayed with that port. The purpose is to alert the reader […]

I noticed this today. First, I apologise for highlighting the errors of others, but it is relevant to the topic.
FreshPorts has a number of sanity tests that it performs on each commit to a port. It does simple things like:
make -V PORTVERSION
If an error occurs during any sanity test, FreshPorts records and reports […]

Yes, that’s right. You heard me. mail != japanese.
Stefan Walter just wrote me to point out that http://www.freshports.org/mail/squirrelmail/ was incorrectly displaying the content from japanese/squirrelmail. At first, I was thinking physical categories versus virtual categories. I was wrong. It was a good old SQL error.
I recently introduced Better URL Parsing. […]

Kevin Fitzpatrick pointed out that the HTMLification code for FreshPorts was including a comma that wasn’t part of the URL. The comma in question is part of the Makefile for java/linux-sun-jdk14. In that file, you’ll find this:

IGNORE: You must manually fetch the J2SE SDK self-extracting file for the Linux platform (j2sdk-1_4_2_10-linux-i586.bin) from http://javashoplm.sun.com/ECom/docs/Welcome.jsp?StoreId=22&PartDetailId=j2sdk-1.4.2_10-oth-JPR&SiteId=JSC&TransactionId=noreg, […]

Virtual categories are nice, but they are hard to deal with. For starters, there is no simple place to get the description for a virtual category. For a physical category, you can do this:
[dan@polo:~/ports/sysutils] $ make -V COMMENT
System utilities
[dan@polo:~/ports/sysutils] $ grep “System utilities” *
Makefile: COMMENT = System utilities
[dan@polo:~/ports/sysutils] $
But for a […]

When I mentioned in the #postgresql channel that FreshPorts/FreshSource had moved to PostgreSQL, the first question was: where’s your Powered By PostgreSQL logo? My reply? At the bottom of the FreshPorts about page. Granted, those logos could be a little higher up on the page.
But that’s not what prompted this post. […]

krion pointed out that the date added field on his watch list was bogus. I checked the code, and sure enough, it was using the wrong value.
The code was displaying commit_log.date_added instead of ports.date_added. I fixed the code and moved it into production early this morning.
cheers