Updating /usr/ports

[Kevin Oberman]

On Sat, May 29, 2021 at 3:21 PM RW via freebsd-questions <
freebsd-questions at freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Sat, 29 May 2021 09:41:11 -0700
> Kevin Oberman wrote:
>
>
> > Does "pkg version" use some other way of doing things than INDEX?  I
> > checked a system that I recently upgraded to 13.0 and it lacks
> > INDEX-13 (or any INDEX-), but "pkg version -vL=" works fine. It is
> > slower, though. It was almost instantaneous and now takes about 45
> > seconds.
>
>
> I was just reading the man page for pkg-version; by default the order
> it tries is INDEX, ports tree, package repository.
>
> This seems strange to me as I would have expected it to default to the
> repository.
>
I would imagine that INDEX is preferred for speed. Milli-seconds vs
Many-seconds. Using repo is probably not a good way to go as people
maintaining a local ports tree are likely to build ports where the repo
could be days behind the tree. I have seen the builders take over four days
to run a large update and as much as 4 days to update all of the mirrors.
That is about a week and there can be a LOT of updates in a week. Makes
maintaining a local tree a bit less desirable. ports tree is dog slow
compared to INDEX and probably repo, but it is reliable and always in sync
with the current local copy of the tree. On a system with 1500 or so ports
installed, if it is done as I guess it is, this would take a while, though
still not as long as building INDEX locally as it would only care about
installed ports.

The above is based on behavior of things and may be wrong.
--
Kevin Oberman, Part time kid herder and retired Network Engineer
E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com
PGP Fingerprint: D03FB98AFA78E3B78C1694B318AB39EF1B055683