svn commit: r407270 - head/ports-mgmt/portmaster

[Adam Weinberger]

> On 4 Feb, 2016, at 8:21, John Marino <freebsd.contact at marino.st> wrote:
> 
> On 2/4/2016 4:18 PM, Pietro Cerutti wrote:
>> Fair enough. Let's just be clear and cautious when suggesting people to
>> switch to beta software for their production needs.
> 
> To be fair, I also suggested poudriere as an alternative which is
> undeniably mature.  At the time, Synth was good enough for production.
> I'm basically polishing now.

I played around with Synth for a couple days. I really, really like it. Once it's production ready it absolutely deserves to be written into the handbook and taught to new users as the go-to tool for overseeing port builds.

Beyond polish, there's two things that made me not want to use it at this point:

1) As you said in your reply to my previous extremely rude email, synth is lightweight as long as it's installed by 'pkg install synth'. Is there some way to mark synth as not to be built by synth? The next 'synth upgrade-system' rebuilds synth, including gcc and all its dependencies. It'd be nice to have a list of ports that synth will fetch rather than rebuild. (I know that I could maintain a separate list of my ports and use that but I'd rather maintain a list of exceptions.) Does that make sense?

2) The big problem for me is rebuilding the repository after every single step. My main pride & joy server is a little VM from RootBSD. Rebuilding the repository takes about an hour. Installing a port, upgrading a port, checking to see if there were updates and not rebuilding anything---each of these tasks takes over an hour. At home I have an 8-core machine with 16G of RAM and an SSD, and rebuilding the repository takes 25 minutes. Is there some way to use synth without having to rebuild the entire repository every time? I can't see myself ever using it when each command takes over an hour to run.

# Adam


-- 
Adam Weinberger
adamw at adamw.org
http://www.adamw.org