Pruning the Ports Tree

[Peter Ulrich Kruppa]

On Sun, 13 Jun 2004, Graham North wrote:

> Hi Uli and the rest of the FreeBSD forum:
>
> Thanks for your advice - though I am not entirely sure what the purpose of
> your last questions are.
I wanted to know about your ressources, since your ports dirctory 
might grow very big, if you don't clean it up every now and then.
Matthew gave some hints about that at the last part of his mail.

I hardly know anything about inodes, but as far as I understand, 
you would have to reformat your entire filesystem to change 
anything about this.

The simpliest way to update your system on a small hd 
would be to keep strictly to binary upgrades and installations. 
You won't need the ports directory then (neither the system
sources in /usr/src).

Another simple idea would be to get another small hd somewhere, 
devide it into two slices and mount one on /usr/ports and the 
other on /usr/src .
This would give you enough space to do full rebuilds of your
system and your ports.

If you have enough patience and time you can also download single 
port directories from www.freebsd.org/ports, place them in 
appropriate directories and try to make install them.
They will complain when they are missing some other port.
I have done that to set up a samba printer server, but next time 
I will use binary packages.


Uli.





>
> To answer though:
> My HD is about 1.2G - it is sharing 2.0G with another OS.
> /usr    ~ 778M
> usr/ports ~247M
> total /usr being used is ~595M  with about 183M free.
>
> The problem is not disk space - it appears to be file handles.   Remember,
> those ports files are only about 0.5K each - so lots of inodes are being
> used in file infrastructure.  Midnight Comm which I use for a lot of file
> navigation indicates that I had 99838 inodes available - of which there are
> now only 602 free!   Yesterday that was about 900, but then I mirrored part
> of a friend's website and used another 300.
> As you can see, I need to free up some file handling capability.
>
> Thanks for any further advice you can give.
>
> Cheers,  Graham/
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Peter Ulrich Kruppa" <root at pukruppa.de>
> To: "Graham North" <graham.north at telus.net>
> Cc: <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
> Sent: Sunday, June 13, 2004 1:29 AM
> Subject: Re: Pruning the Ports Tree
>
>
>> On Sat, 12 Jun 2004, Graham North wrote:
>>
>>> Is it alright to prune the Ports tree - and still do updates later.
>>>
>>> I am running 4.8 stable and recently did a full Ports tree
>>> update using CVSUP.  This generates several questions. 1) I
>>> took the advice of Michael Urban's book and upgraded from the
>>> "Head" of the source tree rather than from that for 4.8 - did I
>>> really want to do that?  Does it matter for a Ports only
>>> updating?
>> It is recommended to use the appropriate kernel and base system
>> with your ports. Things might work the way you did it, or
>> (probably) not.
>>
>> 2) The tree is getting pretty big - result, lots of
>>> files.  My hard drive is not very big - it is down to a few
>>> hundred inodes (file handles) within the usr directory.  Can I
>>> prune the tree on my hard drive without compromising future
>>> updates?  If it helps, my machine is not using X only command
>>> mode so there are lots of Ports that will never be made.
>> For further advices it would be helpful to know how big your hd
>> is and how much diskspace is used by your ports tree.
>> You can check the latter by
>> # du -h -d 1
>> (see # man du)
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Uli.
>>
>>> Thanks for any help that can be offered.
>>>
>>> Graham/
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>
>>   +---------------------------+
>>   |    Peter Ulrich Kruppa    |
>>          |         Wuppertal         |
>>          |          Germany          |
>>          +---------------------------+
>
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 	+---------------------------+
 	|    Peter Ulrich Kruppa    |
         |         Wuppertal         |
         |          Germany          |
         +---------------------------+