Has the port collection become to large to handle.

[Frank Laszlo]

Steven Hartland wrote:
> Garance A Drosihn wrote:
>> Unfortunately, this is the wrong solution.  I'm sure
>> you will love this *IFF* (that means "if and ONLY if")
>> all of *YOUR* ports are in that category of important
>> ports.  We have 15,000 ports because every single one
>> of those ports has some users who think that specific
>> port is important.  While I'm sure that some ports
>> will be willing to be in the "second tier" category,
>> I suspect you'll still have thousands of ports with
>> hundreds of thousands of users who will be personally
>> insulted if <someBastard> refused to include their
>> favorite port in the "important" category.  I doubt
>> you will find anyone who wants to volunteer for the
>> role of <someBastard>, because that is certainly the
>> only name which will be used to describe whoever
>> chooses which ports are in the special category.
>
> How about implement a system where by ports register
> their usage to a central server. This will give us
> some very useful stats about port usage and after some
> time this is examind and all ports whos usage falls
> under a given measure ( to be decided again by stats )
> said port is moved to a secondary port group.

Eww, sounds like a good definition of spyware, I could go without people 
knowing exactly what I install and when.
>
> We could also use this info to prune ports not getting
> any use at all.
Then when someone does need it, it wont be there, and will have to be 
re-ported.
>
> In addition to that a method of syncing ports indivitually
> might be an alternative way to go. That way instead of
> syncing the many thousands of ports to compile up the
> latest version of XXX you would only have to download
> the port you wanted and any dependencies.

This is a neat idea that Marc brought up. Perhaps a dynamic ports tree 
is the answer. With an up to date INDEX, It probably wouldn't be hard to 
patch the ports system to download JUST the ports you need, and their 
dependencies. We would just have to decide on the method to do this. I 
suppose something like cvsup, or portsnap could be utilized to checkout 
single ports. But then again, after that, whats the point of even having 
sub directories for ports? Why not just have it download the framework, 
build the port, and delete everything. Now its starting to resemble 
debians apt-get. *shrug*

-Frank