My interactive version of pkg_add

Garrett Cooper yanefbsd at gmail.com
Sun Sep 28 04:11:29 UTC 2008


On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 7:02 AM, Michel Talon <talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr> wrote:
> Marin Atanasov wrote:
>
>> So what do you think - is it worth improving upon it or it's a waste of
>> time?
>> Thanks for any suggestions.
>
> I think it is worth improving and certainly not a waste of time.
> Each work which allows to use precompiled packages more efficiently
> in FreeBSD is very useful, in my opinion. While compiling ports
> is very fine on a server, where only a small number of ports are
> installed - and then the tool "portmaster" does that really
> wonderfully, looking at the other extreme, a desktop with around
> a thousand installed ports is better managed through precompiled
> packages. And, sorry, but portupgrade is not the solution to do that,
> either with the -P or -PP option.
>
> I can only concur with the suggestion you mention, exploring ftp sites
> to discover what is available here. How to do that efficiently is
> harder. Apparently "official" FreeBSD ftp sites have an INDEX of
> available packages. I hope it is reliable. Then i suggest to download it
> and work from that.
>
> Best regards
>
> --
>
> Michel TALON

INDEX is made available via to pkg_install within sysinstall and
exists on mirrors in the following location:

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/${ARCH}/packages-${VERSION}/INDEX

where ARCH can be:

- amd64
- sparc64
- i386
etc, etc

and version can be:

- 7-stable
- 7.0-release
- 8-current
etc, etc

Poking around: ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports will give you
the results you desire.

-Garrett


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