install or download port collection?

[Ian Lepore]

On Fri, 2014-05-02 at 10:59 -0400, George Rosamond wrote:
> Paul Darius:
> > hi there,
> > 
> > i just new to fbsd and rpi.
> > 
> > the fbsd image downloaded from
> > ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/arm/armv6/ISO-IMAGES/10.0/FreeBSD-10.0-STABLE-arm-armv6-RPI-B-20140427-r265018.img.bz2
> > and the image successfully dd into sdcard 32GB.
> > 
> > surprise that I can not find sysinstall, but at the end I find bsdinstall
> > question is, how to install or download the port collections ?
> > i try using ftp and http direct but no luck
> 
> 
> Paul:
> 
> The likely best route to install the ports tree is to use portsnap(8).
> 
> From there, you can use whatever tools you prefer... subversion, svnup,
> etc to update the source, portmaster or whatever to update the ports.
> 
> George
> 

Portsnap is a painful many-hour process on an RPi.  I remember trying it
last year and it ran for hours and always crashed or panicked before
completion.  Hopefully we've got the crash/panic stuff worked out these
days, but the time is still going to be bad.

I prefer to keep a master ports tree on an nfs server and just mount it
on arm boards as needed, and build ports with WRKDIRPREFIX=/tmp.  If
you're not set up for NFS (and don't want to be) another viable option
might be to do the portsnap process on a faster machine with the results
placed onto a usb drive that you can attach to the rpi.

-- Ian