ports cd

[Jerry McAllister]

Howdy,

> hi all 
> 
> is it possible to download a cd of the ports so i can use it on a
> standaloan machine 

The entire ports collection would not fit on a CD or even a boxful of CDs.
Someone counted a little while ago and found there were more than 10,000
ports available in the system.

I think you may be misunderstanding the ports system and the way it works.
It is a bit confusing because the word 'ports' is gets used to refer to 
two different things;  the ports system that handles downloading and
installing extra utilities and those extra utilities themselves.
So, you use the ports system to install ports...

When you install the 'ports' system you really only install the skeleton 
for the installation of 'ports'.  It is a bunch of makefiles and lists of
files and the addresses of where to get them for download, etc.   

When system (and ports system) installation is complete, you can cd in to 
the /usr/ports/  tree and find whatever you want and type "make"  and when 
it finishes, "make install" and the ports system will go out to whatever 
maintainer is distributing that particular port, download it, configure it, 
compile it, download and install any dependancies and then finally install 
the port you want - all magically before your very eyes.  
Do this for each port you want installed.

Notice by this, that the actual ports are kept in source form
by the various maintainers.   Some of them also build packages of
their ports, but not all of them do that (I would guess, most don't)
A few, such as OpenOffice are so big and take so long to build and
depend on so many things that it is convenient to just install 
their premade package rather than building it all from ports.  But
most are not that big and take only a couple of minutes or so, depending
on your network and machine speed.   So, there is not benefit in
creating binary install packages for them - and some significant
disadvantages.

So, more than you wanted to know, but what you need to know,

////jerry

> 
> arden 
>