Very Beginning CVSup Questions

[RW]

On Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:08:37 -0400
J.C. <human2205 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm a beginner with FreeBSD and somewhat intermediate with Unix-like
> operating systems in general, so please bear the nature of my
> questions. I have some questions about CVSup that seem unclear from
> the handbook. Right now I'm sticking with RELENG_7_0; I intend to
> track -STABLE once I get the hang of CVSup, make buildworld, etc.

You need to understand CVSup, make buildworld, to track RELENG_7_0
(and successors) too, are you sure you want to track a development
branch?

> I understand that the supfile contains the list of *default settings
> (*default tag=RELENG_7_0 etc.) followed by the list of "collections".
> The "Using CVSup" page suggests simply using the src-all collection. I
> understand that when tracking -STABLE I want to update the ports
> collection before running make buildworld; is the ports collection
> included in the "base source tree" (i.e. does src-all imply ports-all)

No

> or should ports-all be included as a separate line beneath src-all?

You can do that, but I think most people use separate files, so they
can be updated independently. There are multiple sample files for this
reason.

> The "Using the Ports Collection" page in the handbook says to make
> sure /usr/ports is empty before running csup because otherwise "csup
> will not prune removed patch files." Isn't this what the "delete" in
> the supfile (as in the line *default release=cvs delete use-rel-suffix
> compress) is for? 

It's a bit subtle, csup has to establish a baseline in its metadata
for it to be fully confident about which files it can delete, this can
be done starting with an empty or fully syncronized tree. There's also a
separate issue that it never deletes files which have never been
under CVS. 

> Do I have to clean /usr/ports every time I run csup
> or just the first time?

Just the first.
 
> If I don't care about encrypted transmission or HTTP vs. CVS
> protocols, are there any compelling reasons to use portsnap instead of
> CVSup/csup?

portsnap is much faster. And since the fetch part doesn't affect the
ports tree it can be done safely from a crontab, which speeds things up
even more.