Reducing the size of the ports tree (brainstorm v2)

[Roger Marquis]

Darren Pilgrim wrote:
> The issue of 512b sector storage media going underlies this discussion.

Whether the block size or fragment size is 512b or 512k it still seems
trivial given drive capacities.

What's missing here is a business case.  Would it be worth all the
refactoring that myself and others would have to do to accommodate the
proposed change?  From my perspective the cons outweigh the pros.

Was a time when FreeBSD was believed to be a more stable and compatible
platform than Linux.  Of course all that backwards compatibility was
thrown out the window with this year's make and pkg updates, which made
management at my business much more receptive to the linux admin's calls
for linux-everywhere, but this is a matter for the community to decide.

The question end-users ask is whether FreeBSD is a stable enough
(compared to Linux) to build or port applications to or is it more of a
high-maintenance developer's platform?  The market leader's take on that
<https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata> is clear, 5.5
years production and 13 years extended!  That's 13 years during which few
hours and little budget has to be allocated for devs or admins to
accommodate OS deltas, deltas which rarely provide any benefit whatsoever
to the end-user.

>  Cutting down the number of files has wide-reaching performance gains
> with subversion as well.

As has been noted already this is an SVN issue not a ports tree issue.
There are more appropriate ways to update if speed is that much of an
issue.  For most of us end-users it doesn't matter as we use portsnap
(and update speed really isn't an issue).

IMO,
Roger Marquis