Date: Fri, 07 Mar 1997 03:54:57 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: ports@freebsd.org Cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Getting /usr/ports everywhere... Message-ID: <4821.857735697@time.cdrom.com>
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I've been thinking about this for awhile, and I'm wondering whether or
not 2.2 might be a good time to unleash /usr/ports as a distribution
tarball as part of the release.
To explain my rationale for this bold proposal:
/usr/ports with no distfiles is *small* - about 31MB for 810 ports
right now, which seems a very reasonable cost/benefit ratio to me.
The lndir trick is slow, eats lots of inodes while leaving you still
dependant on your CD or NFS mounted ports tree, lndir doesn't come as
a standard component (you need to load XFree86's bin component) and
it's no longer supported by sysinstall anyway (it was too slow). If I
made ports a simple distribution, similar to the ``compat*'' dists, it
would be trivial to add it to sysinstall's list of nifty things to
load and one could also elect to do it at any later time with the same
install.sh script the other dists have.
If we could count on /usr/ports being more "standard equipment" on
FreeBSD, even at the cost of 31MB, it would make it possible to answer
a *huge* array of questions with "No problem, go to /usr/ports/blah/feh
and do a ``make install clean'' to install the optional gadget you're
looking for (but don't know it yet)" with reasonable assurance that it
will solve the user's problem. As it stands now, we first have to
explain how to get ahold of and use ports before we can offer some
piece of it as a solution.
I'd also like to make the ports collection a little more well
integrated as a general resource, with more targets aimed at people
looking for things ("cd /usr/ports; make search KEY="emacs") and just
on the whole more accessible to the total novice. Making it a 1st
class object in the installation menu would be a good first step, I
think!
Comments? Partially fermented fruit?
Jordan
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