availability of distfiles

[Kevin Kinsey]

Peter wrote:
> Hi.  I have a question regarding how distfiles become available to the
> ports tree.  For example, on freshports it says that a version is
> available (since March 28) for a given port.  When I attempt to install
> the port ("make install clean") I see that FreeBSD is trying to find
> the distfile for the same version but it fails.  When I manually take a
> look at the distfile location the version indeed does not exist.  So
> how can this happen?

Ports tree out of date?  (doesn't seem overly likely, but...)
Hoster problems?
Newer version exists?
Version change backed out due to security issues?
"   "    "  performance issues?
Distfiles moved ... (see first one above....)
Need better MASTER_SITE variable?

Really, one can only guess. You didn't say _which_
port, for starters.

Bill Fenner does some work on this: see:

      http://people.freebsd.org/~fenner/portsurvey/bad.html

HTH,

Kevin Kinsey


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