Portsnap

[Chris]

On 28/01/06, Donald J. O'Neill <donaldjoneill at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Saturday 28 January 2006 13:36, Gerard Seibert wrote:
> > I just started using 'portsnap' on my FreeBSD 5.4 PC. If I were to
> > run cvsup again, and perhaps 'portsdb -Uu' would that cause a problem
> > if 'portsnap' were run again? Would I have to run the extract command
> > again to initialize the ports tree?
> >
> > Thanks
>
> My personal opinion is: you're going to be unhappy if you do that. The
> first time you use portsnap, it takes a while, but after that initial
> use and setup, nothing can touch it for speed.
>
> I used to use portsdb once upon a time, but the ruby bug finally hit me
> and I had to look for other means to accomplish the same task. Now I
> use portversion (`portversion -v | grep needs` updates portsdb, pkgdb
> and outputs a list of packages needing updating) which does it faster
> and better.
>
> Don


Concerning speed I discovered the version in the ports tree is very slow, I
have portsnap running zippy when using fetch on 2 5.4 boxes which I use the
version in the base system, on 2 5.3 boxes and a 4.10 box I use the version
from ports and portsnap fetch takes about 20-30 minutes to fetch 2000 port
patches, which takes a few seconds on the base version, I discovered the
base version doesnt fetch from a url but instead of a new server.  I
contacted the dev and he confirmed the ports version is old so I guess the
ports maintainer needs to update it until that is done I dont reccomend it
for 5.3 and older.

Chris