No update for a day on ports?

[Mark Millard]

Felix Palmen felix at palmen-it.de wrote on
Fri Apr 2 22:49:58 UTC 2021 :

> * Guido Falsi via freebsd-ports <freebsd-ports at freebsd.org> [20210403 00:35]:
> > On 02/04/21 23:16, The Doctor via freebsd-ports wrote:
> > > but I use pkg/portsnap .
> > > 
> > > How does that affect us?
> > 
> > AFAIK you can't use it anymore. Use gitup. It's almost a drop-in
> > replacement.
> 
> There was an announcement to deprecate it, but it's still built with
> releng/13 so far, and I'd be surprised if the snapshots for it wouldn't
> be available any more. Deprecation of portsnap AFAIK isn't directly
> related to moving to git. (someone correct me please if I'm wrong)

/usr/sbin/portsnap is just a shell script:

# file /usr/sbin/portsnap 
/usr/sbin/portsnap: POSIX shell script, ASCII text executable

Just because the shell script portsnap is installed does not
mean that it will provide updates (that would ultimately
be based the FreeBSD ports git repository content).

The lines in the script that fetch the compressed snapshot
look like:

        echo "Fetching snapshot generated at `date -r ${SNAPSHOTDATE}`:"
        fetch -r http://${SERVERNAME}/s/${SNAPSHOTHASH}.tgz || return 1

where by default SERVERNAME is as shown below:

# grep SERVERNAME /etc/portsnap.conf
SERVERNAME=portsnap.FreeBSD.org

(It gets the SNAPSHOTHASH from another file fetched from the
server. I'll not indicate such details.)

Saying that portsnap is to be deprecated is to say that the
http://${SERVERNAME}/s/${SNAPSHOTHASH}.tgz files (and related)
will not have updated versions to fetch --and that will cause
portsnap to stop working for its purpose, eve if installed.

It is likely that the lack of:

http://${SERVERNAME}/s/${SNAPSHOTHASH}.tgz

files (and related) is tied to not producing such files
from the new FreeBSD ports git repository.

So, likely: Yes, directly related to moving to git.

> 
> Still, in the long run, expect it to vanish.
> 

When /usr/sbin/portsnap is removed from the file systems
is not in control of when useful:

http://${SERVERNAME}/s/${SNAPSHOTHASH}.tgz

files exist. But there is not much point to having
/usr/sbin/portsnap in the file systems once useful
versions of such files are no longer available to
fetch.


===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com
( dsl-only.net went
away in early 2018-Mar)