Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 18:18:02 -0800 From: Darryl Okahata <darrylo@sr.hp.com> To: Richard Wackerbarth <rkw@dataplex.net> Cc: freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: /usr/ports/ too big? Message-ID: <200002110218.SAA06556@mina.sr.hp.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 10 Feb 2000 18:26:11 CST." <00021018491700.00777@localhost.localdomain>
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Richard Wackerbarth <rkw@dataplex.net> wrote:
> I well recognize how it all works. But, from a practical point, no system is
> complete w/o some ports. I am concerned with the POV of a "typical" user.
> We need to make our system (even) more "user friendly". The typical user need
> s
> to be aware of the resources available w/o being burdened with stuff they don
> 't
> need. Not everyone has T3 net access and a tera-byte of HD. :-)
While the system does need a lot more work to make it user-
friendly, I think the users that need the "user-friendliness" the most,
will probably opt to install packages instead of ports. They'll only
use ports for those programs that can't be made into packages.
[ Unfortunately, the files needed for linux compatibility (which are
very popular) are not available as packages. They're only available
as ports. ;-( ]
Unless you or someone else are willing to write a nice, user-
friendly program, I don't think much is going to come of this. I think
most developers believe/understand that FreeBSD is lacking in many areas
of user-friendliness, and complaining about it (no matter how correct
you are) often does not lead to a successful outcome.
[ I can speak from experience. ;-) I've complained, b*tch*d, moaned,
and whined in the past, and these things only serve to blow off steam.
Often, I've gotten the best results by solving the problems myself
(when no one else is solving or wants to solve them). ]
Historically, with open-source projects with a large number of
developers, progress often comes about because some developer has an
itch, and does something about it.
> However, my point is that, although I NEED the recent history, and the "Libra
> ry
> of Congress^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HFreeBSD NEEDS to maintain the total history,
> I doubt that any of the developers have had any reason to examine distant
> history for more that a file or two. I see no reason for the world-wide
> community to be FORCED (see how CVS stores things) to keep the ENTIRE history
> online and on numerous development platforms. There has to be a better way to
> utilize resources.
You only need the CVS tree to be on one local system (if you don't
want to use the public ones). Personally, I like having all of the old
history. While the "entire" CVS repository isn't small, it's not all
that large, either. From du(1), in 1K-blocks:
16608 CVSROOT
500 distrib
66626 doc
170614 ports
621726 src
9890 sup
14650 www
Total size is around 1GB, which isn't all that big nowadays.
--
Darryl Okahata
darrylo@sr.hp.com
DISCLAIMER: this message is the author's personal opinion and does not
constitute the support, opinion, or policy of Agilent Technologies, or
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