Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2005 02:46:19 -0800 From: Colin Percival <colin.percival@wadham.ox.ac.uk> To: Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe@nsu.ru> Cc: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Adding bsdiff to the base system Message-ID: <424BD4FB.1050304@wadham.ox.ac.uk> In-Reply-To: <20050331102437.GA98638@regency.nsu.ru> References: <424B3AAB.6090200@wadham.ox.ac.uk> <20050331102437.GA98638@regency.nsu.ru>
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Alexey Dokuchaev wrote: > I also want to ask if there're enough reasons to bring portsnap and > its dependencies into the base. What's wrong with having it in ports? > It does not seem to be used/needed for vast majority of our user base, > or am I wrong? I'll conceed that portsnap is not yet used by the majority of our user base; but I think that is largely because portsnap is still quite new, and thus relatively unknown. At present portsnap is the only mechanism available by which most users can securely maintain an up-to-date copy of the FreeBSD ports tree; it also provides some other advantages over cvsup (reduced bandwidth and ports INDEX/INDEX-5/INDEX-6 files). Since portsnap and its dependencies will not significantly bloat the base system -- portsnap + bsdiff weigh in at a combined 54kB -- I think it is a sufficiently useful tool to justify inclusion. When you consider that cvsup is a classic example of a program which is only excluded from the base system as a result of its dependencies, and portsnap makes cvsup unnecessary for most users, the case is even clearer. Colin Percival
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