Date: Sun, 03 Aug 1997 01:59:46 +0100 From: Ade Lovett <ade@lovett.com> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: ports-current/packages-current discontinued Message-ID: <E0wup1O-0003bf-00@makai.lovett.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 02 Aug 1997 17:29:34 PDT." <17153.870568174@time.cdrom.com>
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"Jordan K. Hubbard" writes: > >But it doesn't work in a stand-alone environment. I wish people would >stop assuming that everyone in the world has a T1 to their desks or a >CDROM full of convenient tarballs. It's just not the case and arguing >that ports is a complete replacement for /usr/src is just naive in the >extreme. Well, I for one am not arguing this to be the case. What we need is something along the ports line, but extended to deal with most (if not all) situations. But first, we have to consider the types of installation that we're supporting. It seems to me that we have the following types: 1. someone with a some kind of full net connection (maybe a T1, or even a dialup with lots of time :), that only downlaods a boot floppy. (net-poweruser) 2. someone who, by one means or another, has a complete source tree available to them, be it on cdrom, or they've downloaded the whole lot over the net, or whatever. (local-poweruser) 3. someone who has downloaded a basic system over the net (equivalent to grabbing the -release floppy sets from an ftp server), and then installs locally. (binary-enduser) The powerusers are easy to deal with, using the existing ports mechanism.. they have access to the full sources, and can just go (cd /usr/ports; make world) and go to sleep for a while. #3 is somewhat different. They don't have the time, nor the inclination, nor the space etc.. to build stuff from scratch. Yet they still want access to our packagised system (beyond the base FreeBSD code, which will continue to be installed in the usual manner). Surely the solution is to provide binary releases of our packagised software (indeed, we already have this with ports/ and packages/). Whatever we do, the enduser is still going to have to get their code from somewhere, be it local cdrom, or over the net. By reducing the core system to a minimum, we've saved them download time by them not having to pull down something which they're never going to use, so we provide options, either at download time (or install time) as to whether they want to download selected parts, or everything, at their own discretion. Why do I feel like I'm missing something fundamental here? :) -aDe -- Ade Lovett, Demon Internet Ltd.
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