Reducing the size of the ports tree (brainstorm v2)

[Mark Felder]

On Thu, Nov 6, 2014, at 03:24, Anton Shterenlikht wrote:
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean here.
> I've systems where I install 99% of packages
> from official repo servers, and then rebuild
> 1% from ports where the default options are
> no good for me. Is this not supported?
> Or do you mean something else?
> 

You're treading dangerous ground unless you can be sure your ports tree
svn checkout matches the checkout that was used to build the public
packages. An example would be a situation where there was a library bump
and your ports and packages don't match and now you have some binaries
which don't work. If you have problems and you are using ports and
packages mixed you will not find much sympathy in my experience.

Bapt has mentioned a desire for tracking packages built from ports and
making this much easier to support by having "pkg upgrade" detect the
need to rebuild the port with your custom options and automatically
updating the ports tree and building. This would be a supported process.
I think this sounds like a fantastic way to solve this problem for the
masses.