Pruning the Ports Tree

Peter Ulrich Kruppa root at pukruppa.de
Sun Jun 13 21:37:51 PDT 2004


On Sun, 13 Jun 2004, Graham North wrote:

> Hi Uli:
> Thanks again.   There was an email from Mathew Seaman - however it came as
> only attachments, and not knowing him I did not open them - there was not
> text at all in the body of the email.
> Maybe I will now open it..
I read my emails with pine (a console mail client) on my FreeBSD 
system - no chance for Windows virii.

> I do not know anything much about inodes or file handles either... My
> thinking was to just use brute force and chop away much of the ports
> collection that I am not likely to need on my little web server.
Too true,

you would need
- apache (and if you like mod_php and mysql ???)
- midnight commander (mc) for file management
- a console browser (links or lynx) for quick checks.

Still I would recommend binary upgrades, these programs don't 
need any special compile time options. But that's your fun.

Uli.


> I don't want to put everything into too much of a tizzy however the next
> time I update them.  Probably the most sensible thing to do is simply remove
> it entirely and just do single port upgrades as needs be.
>
> Cheers,  Graham/
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Peter Ulrich Kruppa" <root at pukruppa.de>
> To: "Graham North" <graham.north at telus.net>
> Cc: <tim at typhoon.techvalley.ca>; <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
> Sent: Sunday, June 13, 2004 3:11 PM
> Subject: Re: Pruning the Ports Tree
>
>
>> 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/
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
>>>>> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
>>>>> To unsubscribe, send any mail to
>>> "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>   +---------------------------+
>>>>   |    Peter Ulrich Kruppa    |
>>>>          |         Wuppertal         |
>>>>          |          Germany          |
>>>>          +---------------------------+
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
>>> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
>>> To unsubscribe, send any mail to
> "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>>>
>>
>>   +---------------------------+
>>   |    Peter Ulrich Kruppa    |
>>          |         Wuppertal         |
>>          |          Germany          |
>>          +---------------------------+
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>

 	+---------------------------+
 	|    Peter Ulrich Kruppa    |
         |         Wuppertal         |
         |          Germany          |
         +---------------------------+


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list