From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Oct 14 8:43:29 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from news-ma.rhein-neckar.de (news-ma.rhein-neckar.de [193.197.90.3]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E2F4A14C27 for ; Thu, 14 Oct 1999 08:43:14 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from daemon@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de) Received: from bigeye.rhein-neckar.de (uucp@localhost) by news-ma.rhein-neckar.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with bsmtp id RAA13573 for freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; Thu, 14 Oct 1999 17:43:08 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from daemon@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by bigeye.rhein-neckar.de (8.9.3/8.9.3) id QAA85862 for freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; Thu, 14 Oct 1999 16:51:45 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from daemon) From: naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de (Christian Weisgerber) Subject: Re: Ports system *rocks* Date: 14 Oct 1999 16:51:45 +0200 Message-ID: <7u4qm1$2jqp$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> References: <871zazvtou.fsf@main.wgaf.net> <87g0zevk9o.fsf@main.wgaf.net> <871zayvcps.fsf_-_@main.wgaf.net> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Arcady Genkin wrote: > I'm *very* impressed with the way ports stuff is organized. [..] > Takes strain off FreeBSD's ftp servers, too, because the > packages get downloaded from their own home sites... Actually, if this were necessarily so, this would be a major strike against the ports collection. Imagine for a moment that your host is on a local ethernet that is in turn connected to a large national network, which has FTP mirror sites hanging off a 34..155Mbit/s backbone, but whose international gateway is hopelessly congested. Would you then prefer to pull tarballs at 100 bytes/s from overseas if the same data is sitting on one of those nearby FTP mirrors, with the limit to the download speed only being your local 10 Mbit/s ethernet line? Now, I don't need to imagine this. I experience it every day. Fortunately, the ports mechanism is more flexible. In /etc/make.conf you can specify mirror sites for many well-known master archives, such as GNU, Perl CPAN, etc. And you can specify an override, so a first attempt will be made to fetch the distfiles from, say, your nearby FreeBSD mirror. -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message