Retrieving less data on cvsup?

[George Georgalis]

On Mon, Nov 01, 2004 at 12:54:20AM +0100, Diego Calleja wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I recently cvsup'ed the FreeBSD ports list. Syncing the ports database has
>always been painful with slow connections, even with compression, specially
>with freebsd's ports. I've always wondered if there's some way of not
>downloading some of the files until I use them, like say
>/usr/ports/foo/files/file.patch, which I'm not going to use until I install
>the program, if I install it. I've diving trough the handbook but I didn't
>find anything, or I missed it. It's possible to do something like that?

Maybe someone else has, but I've never heard of anything like that. It
does sound like a good idea (tm) for dfly-ports though, maybe a file for
each section that contains names, url and description of programs in
that section, but no version information, so they only need occasional
downloading, not with each version change. When a package is actually
installed then the typical makefile stuff is downloaded.

as for your immediate problem, here's how I dealt with it today...
first find this link ;-)
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvsup.html#CVSUP-MIRRORS
and choose the fastest location for you. for me I guessed it was
one of the cvsupX.us.FreeBSD.org servers (though NL is fast for
most things). I then ran (bash)
for n in `seq 1 18`; do fping -c5 cvsup${n}.us.FreeBSD.org ; done
and determined the one with best response for me (by a long shot).

I used that server in my supfile but also commented out "ports-all" and
manually selected the sections I might be using. to simplify things
down the road I'll probably move towards ports-all, cause I guess
once you have them they don't change much. If you have a box around
to mirror ports you can use that vs your link, for new builds.

Regards,
// George


-- 
George Georgalis, systems architect, administrator Linux BSD IXOYE
http://galis.org/george/ cell:646-331-2027 mailto:george at xxxxxxxxx