Date: Sat, 13 May 2006 21:39:46 +0100 From: Shaun Amott <shaun@inerd.com> To: fbsd <fbsd@a1poweruser.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org, freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Has the port collection become to large to handle. Message-ID: <20060513203946.GA2050@picobyte.net> In-Reply-To: <MIEPLLIBMLEEABPDBIEGIEPBHGAA.fbsd@a1poweruser.com> References: <MIEPLLIBMLEEABPDBIEGIEPBHGAA.fbsd@a1poweruser.com>
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On Sat, May 13, 2006 at 02:28:49PM -0400, fbsd wrote:
>
> Users are consuming massive bandwidth to download and it
> consumes a very large chunk of disk space. Saying nothing about
> the wasted resources consumed to back it up repeatedly.
>
cvsup uses a relatively tiny amount of bandwidth, since only changes are
being sent. Personally, I have a local cvsup mirror from which my other
machines get their updates, so really, there isn't any wastage.
As for backing it up... well, that's just silly. The ports collection
and its entire history is always available and mirrored to countless
machines.
If bandwidth really is a problem, then it is possible - but not
necessarily a good idea - to check out individual ports via CVS.
> What are your thoughts about requesting the ports group to create
> a new category containing just the ports most commonly used
> including
> their dependents and making this general category the default
> used to download. This would be a much smaller sized download
> containing everything necessary to build the most used ports.
> Many of the dependents are used over and over by many
> different port applications.
Exactly which ports are "commonly used", and how do you track this?
Apache? PHP? We have several versions of each; four or five versions of
the big databases, and these all have dependencies, which have their own
dependencies, and so on.
The common category would have to be pretty large, catering for enough
users to be worthy of its name, and containing all the possible
dependencies.
As soon as you need a port that isn't in the common category, you're out
of luck: the rest of the tree needs to be downloaded.
> and say that only ports in this category will have packages
> built and keep up to date. All ports not in this special
> category will not have packages built at all. I think this
Bad idea. Again, as soon as someone wants a package not in the "special"
list, they lose out. Besides, building packages serves another purpose:
quality assurance. Building packages ensures that the ports can be built
correctly, and serves as a tool for testing the base system.
> Another idea I would like to throw out to the list is how about
> requesting the ports group to add a function to packages so the
> installer of the package can select what version of the dependent
> components should be included in the install.
This would only work for runtime dependencies. Most software is compiled
differently depending on what versions of things are available at the
time of compilation.
--
Shaun Amott [ PGP: 0x6B387A9A ]
Scientia Est Potentia.
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