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Date:      Wed, 15 Oct 1997 01:58:44 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Donald Burr <dburr@POBoxes.com>
To:        Kristian Kennaway <kkennawa@physics.adelaide.edu.au>
Cc:        ports-jp@FreeBSD.ORG, ports@FreeBSD.ORG, committers@FreeBSD.ORG, jraynard@jraynard.demon.co.uk, asami@cs.berkeley.edu, (Andreas Klemm) <andreas@klemm.gtn.com>
Subject:   Re: 8 days until 2.2.5...  Administrative notices.
Message-ID:  <XFMail.971015020727.dburr@POBoxes.com>
In-Reply-To: <9710150749.AA14643@bragg>

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My secret spy satellite informs me that on 15-Oct-97, Kristian Kennaway
wrote:

>> On Tue, Oct 14, 1997 at 02:08:57AM -0700, Satoshi Asami wrote:
>> >  * On Mon, Oct 13, 1997 at 03:56:57AM -0700, Satoshi Asami wrote:
>> >  * I know this is probably too late for 2.2.5, but I thought it might
>be
>> >  * worth mentioning anyway.  What do people think to putting the size
>of
>> >  * the tarball somewhere in the skeleton for each port?  This would
>be
>> >  * very helpful for people with poor Internet connectivity.  Quite a
>few
>> >  * times I've thought about installing a port, but wasn't sure how
>long
>> >  * a download I was letting myself in for.  Currently, the only way
>this
>> >  * can be done is by looking on the master site.
>> > 
>> > Hmm.  That is an interesting idea.
>> 
>> Another thing is, that it would be fine, if fetch would show
>> more infos about the download progress. Percent of downloaded
>> data, performance (K/sec), estimated time remaining.
>> 
>> When downloading large files it would be extremely useful.
>
>This is why I prefer ncftp v2.x as my ftp client - I wonder if it would 
>be possible to replace fetch with ncftp as the ports file-collection 
>mechanism if fetch doesnt have these capabilities (and they cant easily 
>be added).

Noooo, not that!  :)

If you were around in the FreeBSD 2.0.5 days, you might remember that the
ports system at that time actually used ncftp to get the distfiles.  fetch
was written to replace ncftp as the distfile getter, because (I believe)
ncftp had a more encumbering copyright/license (I think it's shareware?)
and the FreeBSD team obviously didn't want this.  Also, they wanted to
allow http transfers (as well as ftp), which fetch does.

I think going back to ncftp would be a big step backwards! which is imho
the WRONG direction to be looking! :)

But I do agree that fetch should be somewhat more verbose in the
information it delivers.  Something like this:

Getting foo.tar.gz (380k/1522k), 25% done, 3.6 K/sec, 0:18 remaining...

The k/sec figure would be useful to make sure you're getting the most ouf
or your modem (or to brag about your high speed internet connection), and
the time remaining is would be very useful for deciiding whether you want
to sit there and wait for the port to download, or if you want to abort
it).

- ---
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