Suggestion to display date/time of port addition or modification

[Adam Weinberger]

>> (11.18.2003 @ 1936 PST): Peter Leftwich said, in 1.4K: <<
> [1] Two quick questions/suggestions if I may?  Has the "ports team" ever
> considered including the date/time of when the port was added or modified?
>  This could be displayed as a time code, such as "20031118" (today's date)
> and appear on the line that says:
> 
> Description : Sources : Package : Changes : Download

For this, you have a number of options. Within the first 5 lines of port
Makefiles, you can find the CVS Id tag, which tells you when the
Makefile was last updated. For example:

monkey at smacky:~% grep FreeBSD: /usr/ports/graphics/gimp-devel/Makefile
# $FreeBSD: ports/graphics/gimp-devel/Makefile,v 1.134 2003/11/17 12:28:58 trevor Exp $

You can also use cvsweb (http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports) to
examine when stuff happened for ports.

And you can probably get that information from freshports.org.
Freshports.org has *everything*, if you know where to find it.

> [2] I do not understand the usefulness nor see the "beauty" of the current
> method of installing ports.  Why must a user download elementary
> "instructions" for programs A, B, C, D, through Z when all he or she may
> want are programs P and Q which require libraries B, C, D, and E?  In
> other words, have the people in the know ever considered making it
> possible to download one tarballed directory, whose Makefile could figure
> out which other tarballed directories are needed and "fetch" them in
> sequence?  This seems far simpler than 19 megs of unnecessary files that
> may never be used possibly.  Thank you for listening, hopefully my remarks
> generate some discussion.

Peter, I think you'd be much better off using packages. The ports tree
is designed to be used all in one piece. I once spent weeks trying to
get you to download the ports/Mk directory, and I don't want to go
through that again.

# Adam


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