svn - but smaller?

[Andrew Reilly]

On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 03:20:42PM +0100, Gyrd Thane Lange wrote:
> On 23.01.2013 15:40, Oliver Brandmueller wrote:
> > However, I either overlook something important or we are now at the
> > point we had with cvsup in the early days: The software I need to
> > (source-)update the system doens't come with the base and installing svn
> > is a PITA. [...]
> 
> It is not a well publicized fact, but I understand that the base utility 
> freebsd-update(8) through it's freebsd-update.conf(5) is able to pull 
> the base sources (/usr/src/) only instead of also updating your binaries.
> 
> less /etc/freebsd-update.conf
> 
>    # Components of the base system which should be kept updated.
>    Components src world kernel
> 
> The above setting is the default, but you may easily leave out 
> everything but "src". (Caveat: I have not tried it myself yet.)
> It also have some optional settings for preserving local changes to the 
> source instead of blowing them away (default).
> 
> This will allow you to use the sources for a custom build and install 
> yourself.

I've been using svn from ports for a while, but would like to switch to a
FreeBSD-self-contained update method, so I've just given that a shot.  I've
tweaked out world and kernel from the freebsd-update.conf (and also tweaked out
the updateIfChanged and MergeIfChanged lines, just in case it tried to do
something to my config.)

Anyway, it failed thusly:

$ sudo freebsd-update fetch
Password:
Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 3 mirrors found.
Fetching public key from update5.freebsd.org... failed.
Fetching public key from update4.freebsd.org... failed.
Fetching public key from update3.freebsd.org... failed.
No mirrors remaining, giving up.

Any thoughts on what is going wrong there?  I would imagine that if there was a
real problem, rather than pilot error, there would be considerable noise on the
lists.  Do I need to "prime" the system by grabbing some keys from somewhere?

I have a fully-up-to-date /usr/src world and kernel thanks to the
svn+UPDATING process, fwiw.

> Also for ports we have the portsnap(8) utility, also in base. So it is 
> perfectly possible to get sources for everything using just the tools in 
> base. No csup or svnup is required.

That manual page reads as though it downloads the whole tarball of the whole ports
tree every time: that doesn't sound terribly efficient.  Is there enough
redundancy in the ports structure to make compressing a tarball a win, compared to
uncompressed version differences at, say, weekly updates?

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew