ports/www is too full

[Paul Chvostek]

On Fri, Oct 22, 2004 at 04:52:21PM -0600, Robin Schoonover wrote:
> > 
> > A single directory with 12000 subdirectories in it may be unruly ...
> > and we'd have to fix oddities like hydra, jags, replay, etc ... but it
> > would provide for the most flexible expansion, and the symlink tree
> > would provide an equivalent interface to folks comfortable with the
> > current setup.
> 
> Population.  cvs (and probably cvsup) do not handle symlinks well. You
> would have to have a script populate symlinked ports into the categories
> by hand.

Yes, that's what I was suggesting.  A change like this would require
that the symlinks not be part of the distribution, but be built by a
tool like portsdb (nee portupgrade).  The downside is that it's a fairly
major architectural change that might break lots of stuff.  The upside
is that it's a SMOP, nothing really challenging.

I'm not much of a ruby guy, but I could easily write a tool in awk to
convert from current to revised layout, both in an installed ports tree
and a repository.  Making the existing pkgtools and portupgrade happy
would be a bit more work...  And we'd have to get everybody to agree on
a process for adding new keywords.

This would eliminate the usefulness of /usr/ports/MOVED, since
everything would be in one place.

If 12000 is just too frickin' many for a directory, perhaps some "titan"
categories could be used to aggregate ports as they are now: app, devel,
sysutil.  Whatever would have the least chance of category overlap.
MOVED can then still point to the new location, and cvsup may be a
little happier.

But what is the right design?  For the folks who like the directories,
would symlinks be acceptable?  If we aggregate, does it make sense to go
ALL the way, or continue to maintain some sort of logical division to
real port homes, albeit fewer (and more atomic)?

Just brainstorming here.  Any idea is a good idea until you have to
put it into production.

-- 
  Paul Chvostek                                             <paul at it.ca>
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