Time to abandon recursive pulling of dependencies?

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

On Sat, 19 May 2007, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>
> 	My lord.. now I see what everyone means in terms of taking a long 
> time to update the ports / package databases. If you use portsnap, it doesn't 
> take a long time. However, if you use csup/cvsup, it appears to take a long 
> time running make and ruby (primarily disk I/O), to update all of the 
> databases. It took approximately 3-5 minutes to complete on a P4 3.0 GHz, so 
> I'd hate to see how long it takes to finish on a slower machine =\...
> 	Maybe this is where Stephen's revisions to pkg_add and bsd.ports.mk 
> would come in handy.
> -Garrett

I would love to help, but I'm a plain vanilla "make install" person, and I 
haven't yet learned all these fancy programs like portinstall.

What specific program are you refering to that takes so long to execute? 
Assume that I have no experience with using these tools.  Then I will see 
if I can make that faster too.  (But my first guess is that I won't be 
able to.)