Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1998 20:08:25 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: asami@FreeBSD.ORG (Satoshi Asami) Cc: obrien@NUXI.com, jkh@FreeBSD.ORG, ports@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD Tookit info Message-ID: <28929.904187305@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 26 Aug 1998 18:02:51 PDT." <199808270102.SAA10634@silvia.hip.berkeley.edu>
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> I'd appreciate it if you can keep me in loop for this.... Oh, you'll be more than a little bit in the loop for this, I assure you. :-) I was mostly waiting for Mike to come back from Australia (which he just did today) so that we could have a look at the tools he wrote for the 2.2.7 CD and work out some way of making them more plug-n-play so that you can jump aboard. Hmmmm. I might as well explain my intentions to you as well as everyone else, so here's the deal. :-) What I envision is that the ports (distfile tarballs) and packages collection will be essentially spread out across 8 CDs: 4 from the toolkit and 4 from the main-line FreeBSD product. Now, of course, you won't actually want to put packages on some of those CDs so you'll mark the ones which are already fully taken up with other bits as "full", and the distfile/package splitting tool will simply not choose to allocate any portion of them for its own data. What it should try to do, however, is be generic enough to take some arbitrary list of volumes, each specifying the number of megabytes available, and attempt to cluster distfiles and/or packages using dependency information and, perhaps, a "preferred choice" list which you and your ports team would maintain. Why maintain such a preferred choice list at all? Well, with the 2.2.7 CD, I used Mike's tools to provide the most direct what-fits-where information and I moved packages (by script) accordingly. However, in actual practice that led to things like the "shells" category on the 1st (and most important) CD having only one shell in it, the other shells having migrated by size-sort over to the packages collection on another CD. Clearly, you want to be able to mark some set of essential packages so that they package shuffling tool attempts to keep them together regardless of whether or not they're explicit dependencies of something else. Anyway, the most significant point here, and the one I really most wanted to make, is that this most definitely needs to be automated now. In previous releases you've simply given me one big ports/package tree, the contents of which I then moved around by hand to fit on the various CD images, and the combination of sheer numbers and the need to get our dependencies clustered correctly (which wasn't the case with 2.2.6) has made this not so very easy to do "by hand" anymore. Building the tools to deal with this is also not really such a problem since the task has already been largely dealt with by Mike, it just needing a little polishing now, and what I'm still just not sure of is where the best division of labor lies. I could, of course, just say that this is a CD problem and not one shared with the FTP distributions so it's mine and WC's to deal with - end of story. That does not, however, give the ports team much say in what specifically goes where, and that's also a large part of how "usable" the ports/packages collection is from CDROM. I know Satoshi certainly has a big interest in the CD distributions when they go out, and I daresay that's true of most of the readers of this list - even more so now that a toolkit CD is coming out to encompass more of the bits which have been (of necessity) tossed off of previous CDs. So, anyhow, I think we can do this one of two ways: Satoshi can give me his usual monolithic packages/ and ports/distfiles/ directories and I can continue to split them up however it seems to make the most sense to me, trimming INDEX files appropriately along the way, or Satoshi and crew can get size information from me on what bits of the CDs are not taken up by release/commerce/xperimnt/X11 bits (e.g. "350MB on 1, 0MB on 2, 600MB on 3, 400MB on 4, 650MB on 5(1), etc.") and then can roll packages/ and ports/distfiles/ directories which are already split into the component CDROM subdirs which I can just move straight into place amongst the other stuff. If Satoshi and crew elect to take this on, Mike and I can certainly help with writing the appropriate parts of release/Makefile - perhaps a new cdrom.2 target to pick up where the current cdrom.1 target leaves off? We'd still need to figure out how to keep the "preference" information though - that's nothing that Mike or I have grappled with yet, as I noted before. Comments? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-ports" in the body of the message
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