Re: Retrieving less data on cvsup?

[Diego Calleja <diegocg@xxxxxxxxx>]

El Mon, 1 Nov 2004 12:40:42 -0500 "George Georgalis" <george@xxxxxxxxx> escribió:


> Yeah, brainstorming. Maybe 3 stages of "ports" 1) a nothing downloaded
> version that does cvsup (of the port) for the first time when it
> needs be installed (minimalist), 2) a description version which keeps
> info current on disk for handy searching, and pulls the patch etc as
> needed, and 3) full version, which could come in handy if cvs server is
> unavailable but source location is...

Having tried dragonfly/freebsd and gentoo, I must say that the best
solution I've seen is debian, sid's description file is right now around
3.3 MB (1 MB more if you count the sources file - which may share some
data with the "package" file) and it has the info for around 16000 packages,
with a package description and compressed with gzip...and some people
(like me ;) would love to see a split of the packages file (put the fields
that don't change a lot ej: the description in a separate file so a
security update don't triggers a update in the description file; or create
different files for each group of packages which starts with a given letter;
or create a package file for each package, so you could know what packages
were updated by looking at the dates from the output of "ls -l" in the
FTP directory)

I wonder if you could recreate the ports's structure looking at a debian-like
packages description file. ie: create the makefiles, then a "make install"
downloads everything (what you call "2 stage") including the scripts and
patches neccesary to build it.