Why i need extract not one needed port, but full catalog never needed ports?

[Lowell Gilbert]

"Kevin P. Neal" <kpn at neutralgood.org> writes:

> On Thu, Sep 05, 2019 at 05:43:46PM +0300, Виктор Кутенков via freebsd-questions wrote:
>> 
>> Hello.
>> I'm try find minimum size OS for server / and as desktop. 
>> For server I try use freebsd+nginx+python.
>> For desktop freebsd+i3.
>> The clear freebsd size is ~1Gb. - it is the minimum OS that i found - It is my favorite now.
>> I like work with ports. But why i need dowload and extract ~1Gb empty folders? Is it posible to use next algoritm, for example:
>> Do not make portsnap fetch extract
>> immediately after installing the system make:
>> # /usr/ports/x11/xorg make install clean
>> 1. freebsd check the directory /usr/ports/x11/xorg
>> >> it is empty
>> 2. freebsd check the internet for search "/usr/ports/x11/xorg"
>> >> it is found "data"
>> 3. freebsd dowload and compile data from internet.
>> Why it must make portsnap extract ALL never needed empty folders to
>> system before? Is it posible make in future - search and extract
>> from internet only one needed port? Like # pkg install xorg
>
> There are a number of reasons for requiring all of /usr/ports including
> the practical impossibility of figuring out ahead of time exactly what is
> needed. And even if you wanted to download the files for each port
> individually it would take forever iterating until things stopped failing.
> Version skew during this process could also be an issue.

It's not impossible; it just takes more time and knowledge. 

In particular, knowledge of make(1) and bsd.port.mk.