ports cd

[arden]

On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 15:31, Jerry McAllister wrote:
> 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

thanks for the explanation jerry its clearer now (stuffs up my idea lol)
but clearer on how it works 
> 
> > 
> > arden 
> > 
>