From owner-freebsd-hackers  Thu May 27  8:17: 3 1999
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Date: Thu, 27 May 1999 16:01:28 +0100
From: Dean Lombardo <dlombardo@excite.com>
Organization: University of Kent at Canterbury
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To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, freebsd-ports@freebsd.org
Subject: a two-level port system?
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I apologise if this has been discussed before.

The ports collection seems to be growing at alarming rates.  On one
hand, this is very good; on the other, it has the unfortunate downside
of having to store ten billion little files on one's hard drive.  The
current size of the ports collection is 300+Mb (the output of du -ks
/usr/ports); the actual size could be greater, considering that most of
the files are smaller than 512 bytes.

Now this is perhaps a silly thought, but wouldn't it be more sensible to
have just one Makefile for each port?   All such a Makefile would have
to do is download its port skeleton (on demand), and then do a make in
that skeleton's directory.  After that, everything should be the same as
it is now.

Well, the ports collection is manageable now (although it takes AGES to
download/cvsup), but will it be in the future?

Just a thought.

Dean


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