Has the port collection become to large to handle.

[Chris Hill]

On Mon, 15 May 2006, fbsd wrote:

> The best indicator that the ports collection has become to large is 
> that it took me 2 hours to download the complete port-all collection 
> using A DSL internet connection.

Ah, the crux of the matter. I'd guess that was the driving force behind 
this entire thread.

IMHO, your gripes are misdirected - complain to your ISP about the speed 
and reliability of your service. This should NOT take two hours. It 
could also be a matter of using the wrong server for your time and 
place. If you haven't already, look into the port (or package) 
sysutils/fastest_cvsup.

> To compile the ports I use took another 11 hours.

To me this would be an objectionably long time too, but it's completely 
irrelevant to the issue at hand. The time it takes to compile the ports 
one uses is mainly a function of how much there is to compile. I've also 
found that things go a little faster on the 3.4GHz P4 than they do on 
the 266MHz K6-2   :^P

> This is the reason I went to using packages in the first place.

Fair enough.

> Downloading the complete port collection when I had a dial up 
> connection would go maybe 35 min and them get suspended by the cvs 
> site. I would rerun the job over and over again sometimes taking a 
> week or better to finally get it completed. This makes the download of 
> the complete port collect almost impossible for dial up users.

When I was doing this stuff by dialup I never had such problems. Yes, it 
took forever, but I expect that when using dialup. I would start the 
process and go to bed; in the morning it would be done. Seriously, maybe 
you had a bad phone line. My house is 50 years old, and I've found a 
crusty wire or two.

> On 6.0 I installed all the ports I use by the package method in less 
> than 10 min. In 6.1 release changes were made that no longer allow 
> packages to work with ports as dependents.

The other crux of the matter. Since this (plus the download time, which 
is a network issue) seems to be the meat of your complaint, why not post 
on that subject, instead of asking for drastic changes to the 
ports/packages system? Realistically, which of these requests seems more 
likely to be addressed by the perpetually-swamped developers?

[snip]
> The design of the working collection needs to be made more user
> friendly for everybody including the dial up users.

It's really pretty user-friendly as it is, for those who understand how 
to use cvsup and the various port upgrading tools (and I think that 
includes you).

--
Chris Hill               chris at monochrome.org
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