Has the port collection become to large to handle.

[Marc G. Fournier]

On Sat, 13 May 2006, Garance A Drosihn wrote:

> At 2:28 PM -0400 5/13/06, fbsd wrote:
>> To all question list readers;
>> 
>> Now with 14576 ports in the collection where do you
>> draw the line that its too large to be downloading
>> the whole collection when you just use 10 or 20 of
>> them?
>
> This is a good question.  For all those people who want
> to roll their eyes and ignore this question, please
> answer it.  Where *DO* you draw the line?  Obviously it's
> not at 10,000 ports.  Will it be 20,000?  50,000?  How
> many programs exist?  Will every single program known to
> man eventually be in the ports collection?  How hopeless
> is that?  And if not, then "Where do you draw the line?".

Why draw a line?  Why not just improve installing from ports so that you 
don't have to download the whole ports collection to do so?

For those with 'always on' internet connections, this should be *too* 
difficult ... all you'd need to do is:

download ports-base, which would have to include INDEX
type: make fetch-postfix

and let the make system be smart enough to know to pull down mail/postfix 
... something like a 'fetch' of a postfix.tar.gz tarball from the closest 
ftp server, untar it in /usr/ports/mail/postfix, and that "seeds" your 
ports tree ...

go into mail/postfix and type 'make install' ... have the make system 
smart enough that if a dependency isn't found, first thing it does is 
grabs down that dependency to make it, recursively ...

Now, your /usr/ports will only contain those "ports" that you actually use 
... a 'self-learning ports tree', of sources ...

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy at hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664