Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 11:37:38 GMT From: bart.lateur@skynet.be (Bart Lateur) To: <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: About the "ports" Message-ID: <3923e743.8641020@relay.skynet.be>
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I have the book "The Complete FreeBSD", complete with 4 CD's with 3.4 from last december. (BTW nice job, Greg.) I have some doubts about the ports. First of all, I've already installed a few apps, and most of the ports I have on my local system (in /usr/ports/), are already out of date. So I have doubts if it's any use for keeping a rather complete ports tree on disk at all? Second: why are the ports distributed as a subtree with lots of small files? That doesn't make sense. Downloading the files for a port from the net is pretty difficult. I have to get my ports on my Windows PC. My internet connection on FreeBSD box isn't working yet. Using a plain browser is absolutely impractical. Using an FTP client works. But I still have the problem that the file ownership and permissions aren't right when placed on the FreeBSD box. Why isn't that tree distributed as one single .tar.gz file? For example, for PostgreSQL, the file would be /usr/ports/databases/postgresql.tar.gz . One fetch, you have your port. untar and ungzip, and you're ready to install. Small files waste a lot of disk space (say, 32k of disk space for a file of 200 bytes). That way I'm not surprised that the ports tree takes 40-100Mb. So maybe that same .tar.gz format in the ports tree would save a lot of disk space? Until you actually need it. And then you find you need an update anyway. :-/ And finally, is something changed in the ports mechanism since december? I got the update for postgreSQL, and I've had to modify the Makefile to make it work: the variable DISTNAME was used, but never declared. I've had to combine the package name and the version number (I forgot the exact variables' names) to get it. It compiled just fine. I hope. :-) -- Bart. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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