From owner-freebsd-ports Tue May 2 16:44:27 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Received: from freefall.freebsd.org (freefall.FreeBSD.ORG [204.216.27.21]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 20A6937BB51; Tue, 2 May 2000 16:44:25 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from kris@FreeBSD.org) Received: from localhost (kris@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.9.3/8.9.2) with ESMTP id QAA48162; Tue, 2 May 2000 16:44:24 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from kris@FreeBSD.org) X-Authentication-Warning: freefall.freebsd.org: kris owned process doing -bs Date: Tue, 2 May 2000 16:44:24 -0700 (PDT) From: Kris Kennaway To: Satoshi Asami Cc: ports@freebsd.org Subject: Re: ports projects In-Reply-To: <200005021212.FAA46737@silvia.hip.berkeley.edu> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Tue, 2 May 2000, Satoshi Asami wrote: > @ Fetching distfiles from the nearest master site (status: none) > > same goes for the people in the other sides of the ponds. Any > good ideas? "ping" all the MASTER_SITES and sort them? I know This has long been on my wishlist: what I envision is a once-off "sorting" process which tests bandwidths to all MASTER_SITEs in a nominated list of ports and maintains a database sorted by increasing bandwidth to the destination. This could be regenerated at will by a bsd.port.mk target. The problem is accurately estimating bandwidth. Pinging is a crude metric, but many sites (or their upstream firewalls) block pings, and ICMP traffic may be down-prioritized by intermediate routers. It also only measures latency, not bandwidth. However, it might be a good first-order approximation (it's the method Gozilla! and other download optimizers use on Win32). There's also the pathchar and pchar ports which do a much more intensive estimation of bandwidth, but the downside is it seems to take a long time. I haven't really played with it so it should be possible to make it quick enough to use on large numbers of hosts (e.g. by only measuring the packet sizes used in typical FTP transfers, etc). On the ports which I maintain I try and order the MASTER_SITEs in some kind of network distance order from the US since thats where most of the users are (and a lot of other countries route their traffic through the US anyway), but obviously that also disadvantages some segment of the userbase. > @ Better handling of restrictions (what if depended port is > illegal, is interactive, etc.) during package build (status: none) OpenBSD have taken steps in this direction by defining a set of variables which specify whether a given action is permitted (mirroring, putting on CDROM, building package, etc) OpenBSD have also done a sweep for port license information, which is something we've neglected. They're also in the process of fixing ports so packages can be built as non-root, by making the port install into a local directory and package there (this is basically the same thing as PREFIX-cleanliness) Another item on my wishlist is for ports to respect CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS/CC/CXX for controlling the build. There are far too many ports which don't respect all of these though, so I don't think a bento warning would be effective. > @ Find a replacement for myself so I can retire (status: none) > > Any takers? ;) :-) Kris ---- In God we Trust -- all others must submit an X.509 certificate. -- Charles Forsythe To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-ports" in the body of the message