[HEADS-UP] Announcing the end of port CVS

[Beat Gaetzi]

The development of FreeBSD ports is done in Subversion nowadays.
For the sake of compatibility a Subversion to CVS exporter is
in place which has some limitations. For CVSup mirroring cvsup
based on Ezm3 is used which breaks regularly especially on amd64
and with Clang and becomes more and more unmaintainable.

For those reasons by February 28th 2013 the FreeBSD ports tree will
no longer be exported to CVS. Therefore ports tree updates via CVS
or CVSup will no longer available after that date. All users who use
CVS or CVSup to update the ports tree are encouraged to switch to
portsnap(8) [1] or for users which need more control over their ports
collection checkout use Subversion directly:

% svn co https://svn0.us-west.FreeBSD.org/ports/head /usr/ports

and update a checked out repository using:

% cd /usr/ports && svn update

Advanced users, or larger sites, might consider setting up a local
svn mirror. Both for people doing direct checkouts and for people
wanting to use a local mirror, they can access one of the public
subversion servers [2].

How to set up a Subversion mirror using svnsync(1) is described in
the FreeBSD Committers Guide [3]. Initial seeds to set up a svnsync
mirror are provided on the FreeBSD FTP mirror sites under
/pub/FreeBSD/development/subversion/.

Binary packages for pkg_install are still provided via the FTP mirror
network. There is also pkgng which is a feature rich replacement tool
for pkg_install available in the ports tree under ports/ports-mgmt/pkg.
Packages for pkgng are available on pkg.FreeBSD.org.

To use pkg.FreeBSD.org at least pkgng 1.0 RC6 is needed and can be
enabled in pkg.conf like this (where ${ABI} is dependent on your
system):
PACKAGESITE         : http://pkg.freebsd.org/${ABI}/latest
SRV_MIRRORS         : YES

With pkgng 1.0 SRV_MIRRORS is enabled by default and no longer needs
to be set explicitly. If pkgng prior to 1.0 RC6 is used
http://pkgbeta.FreeBSD.org can be used as packagesite instead.

Please keep im mind that the pkgng infrastructure is still considered
as beta. More information about pkgng can be found at
http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/pkgng and https://github.com/pkgng/pkgng.

Beat, on behalf of portmgr@

[1] http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/handbook/updating-upgrading-portsnap.html
[2] http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/handbook/mirrors-svn.html
[3]
http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/committers-guide/subversion-primer.html