Has the port collection become to large to handle.

[Adrian Pavone]

Steven Hartland wrote:

> Chris wrote:
>
>> On 15/05/06, fbsd <fbsd at a1poweruser.com> wrote:
>> Keep the ports tree how it is, as others have said the size is small
>> on modern hard drives and bandwidth trivial, once the initial ports
>> tree is in place keeping it up to date needs very little bandwidth and
>> its only distfiles that tend to be large, but you only download
>> distfiles for ports you install so this is a very good system.  If at
>> least one person uses a port it is justified and I very much like that
>> most tiny apps I search for in the ports tree do indeed exist.  How
>> would you define commonly used ports? we would end up with a
>> favouritism system in place and many arguments about which ports would
>> be included in the commonly used group, you also forget that many
>> ports that may look meaningless from where you sit are necessary as
>> dependants to other ports.
>
>
> There would be not arguments as stats dont lie. Please read the entire
> thread there are some good ideas in there which would speed up day to day
> use of ports for everyone. Where you get the idea that ports is quick to
> maintain is beyond me it takes a good 30mins to sync up if your a few
> months out of date now a days. 30mins is not much if you have 1 machine
> but add it all up for a large number of machines and its a significant
> amount of time which we all could better spend doing other things instead
> of waiting for a cvsup to complete.

This is why there are options in place that would allow you to download
the cvsup to one of you computers, likely a server of some sort, and
your other computers all retrieve the CVSup from this local server,
significantly speeding up the retrieval time and decreasing the load on
the primary servers, a win for everyone. If you have computers of
varying architectures or in seperated geographical locations this would
not work as worded, but from your wording it sounded like you had a
local LAN of computers.

Ohh, and for your informations, statistics do lie, that is the point of
statistical analysis, which I spent 1 1/2 years of my life studying
before changing into my current Software Engineering/Computer Security
degree.

And, the arguements would arise from the "common" ports/packages
directory, a suggestion of fbsd's I believe, whereby common ports that
would not be built often primarily due to their size, and so wouldn't
show up in statistics (such as Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice, and a number of
others), would be placed into a common directory of the ports/packages
tree, and would be exempt from these statistics. The arguements would
arise over what should be placed into this "common" directory.

And what about the case of a port that would be built many times over
its lifetime, mainly due to program version changes? The first one that
springs to mind would be Firefox. Firefox has had a number of version
changes in the same space of time that Exim, a very commonly used mail
server application, has been updated, and assuming an even distribution
of mail servers and desktop users with firefox, firefox would appear to
be 10-20 times more active over it's lifetime.

It is also common for people with a desktop computer to format their HDD
every 3 months or so, and every time this occured, the desktop PC ports
(Xorg, Firefox, KDE/XFCE/GNOME, OpenOffice.org, etc.) would get a
rebuild/redownload, again throwing the stastics out of whack.

Just my $0.02.

Regards,
Adrian