From owner-freebsd-ports Tue Sep 30 04:59:42 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id EAA21563 for ports-outgoing; Tue, 30 Sep 1997 04:59:42 -0700 (PDT) Received: from zeus.gel.usherb.ca (zeus.gel.usherb.ca [132.210.70.7]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id EAA21557 for ; Tue, 30 Sep 1997 04:59:38 -0700 (PDT) Received: from castor.gel.usherb.ca by zeus.gel.usherb.ca (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA12514; Tue, 30 Sep 97 07:59:15 EDT Received: by castor.gel.usherb.ca (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4) id HAA08185; Tue, 30 Sep 1997 07:59:15 -0400 Date: Tue, 30 Sep 1997 07:59:13 -0400 (EDT) From: "Alex.Boisvert" To: Warner Losh Cc: scott@statsci.com, jgrosch@superior.mooseriver.com, "Jordan K. Hubbard" , ports@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Uh oh.. Time to take another look at the packages collection! In-Reply-To: <199709300401.WAA16107@harmony.village.org> Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Since we can't have all the ports one one media (CD for instance), we need a new concept to "map" each port on a "carring media". As suggested, we could have a "Table Of Contents" which does this. What I suggest is that we create "volumes". One port would belong to a given volume, which is not necessarily associated with its current category. The TOC would access a "volume map" to know where a given port is located on media. (Could be "CD-1", "CD-2" or "ftp.freebsd.org" or "floppy-58"). The volume map would give some kind of base "URL" to fetch the port/distfile. Since we are dealing with removable media in some cases, there some also be a marking on the media to verify that the "mounted" media is the one we want to access. The marking could be a file named after the "volume name" and located at the base URL. (ie: ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/volume1) Ok. Here how it would look: -------------------------------- file: INDEX.TOC format: name, filename (relative to base), volume set, description, ... freeze-2.5,archivers/freeze,arc1,MELT compression,... sharutils-4.1.4,archivers/gshar_gunshar,arc2,SHAR compression,... ---- file: VOLUME.MAP format: volume name, one or more base url arc1,file://cdrom arc2,ftp://ftp.freebsd.org arc3,file://cdrom comm1,file://usr/local/ports,ftp://ftp.localsite.org jp1,ftp://ftp.freebsd.org default,file://cdrom,file://usr/local/ports,ftp://ftp.freebsd.org ... --- Each entry specifies a "path" to look for the port. This is necessary because some lucky people have 7-disk-changers and one CD isn't necessarily always in the same logical CD-drive. In this case, the port installer would search the given path in sequential order. When I have a CD with volume sets "arc1" and "arc2" mounted locally, the following files would exists: /cdrom/arc1 and /cdrom/arc2. If the volume marker isn't found, the port installer would prompt the user to insert/mount (automount?) the correct media. I haven't talked about how to separate the ports in multiple volume sets but I think many will volunteer for this and have already done so ;-) Again, this is just a suggestion based on what other people have already pointed out. Regards, Alex.