Why build INDEX ?

[Kent Stewart]

On Sunday 19 October 2003 10:21 am, Erik Trulsson wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 19, 2003 at 10:09:59AM -0400, Lowell Gilbert wrote:
> > Adam McLaurin <adam.mclaurin at gmx.net> writes:

> > That doesn't mean you have to rebuild your own INDEX file, because
> > you can (and will, unless you specifically refuse it) download it
> > along with the rest of the ports collection.  Of course, those are
> > only built every few weeks, so they generally won't be completely
> > up-to-date either.
>
> There is almost never any need to rebuild INDEX.
> I think sysinstall might use it to get information on available
> packages, but I am not sure.  Other than that it is not really
> needed.

If that was true, why does the man page for portupgrade tell you to do 
the following 

   o   To perform upgrades effectively and correctly, remember to run
        pkgdb(1) with -F on occasions to fix dependency discrepancies,     
        and run portsdb(1) with -Uu every time you CVSup the ports tree 
        to keep your ports INDEX database up-to-date in sync with the 
        tree.

When I checked the cvsweb.cgi,  I see INDEX is currently 2 weeks old and 
before INDEX-5 was updated recently, it was 8 weeks old. 

Kent

-- 
Kent Stewart
Richland, WA

http://users.owt.com/kstewart/index.html