Re: Portsnap is now in the base system

Thierry Herbelot wrote:
> Le Tuesday 9 August 2005 11:04, Colin Percival a écrit :
>>About 12 hours ago I committed portsnap to HEAD.
> 
> I've had a look at the man page(s), and at the web page on 
> http://www.daemonology.net/portsnap/ I'm still missing one piece of 
> information : how are the ports snapshots initially built ?

Magic. :-)

Seriously, I checkout a copy of the ports tree, run `make describes` three
times (for 4.x, 5.x, and 6.x), package up the resulting files, build some
patches, and then throw everything onto my web server.  From there it gets
mirrored by another server (and more mirrors will follow).

Once I've ironed out all the bugs in the building and mirroring, I'll make
that code available via the projects repository.

> One misfeature of cvs is the possibility to fetch incomplete updates to the 
> repository (no atomic commits in cvs, and this must be carried over to 
> cvsup). Do "your" snapshots behave better in this domain ?

No.  I take a snapshot of the files on cvsup-master (via cvsup over an ssh
tunnel -- being a committer hath its privileges :-) ), and that's what I
package up, with the one exception that if the INDEX build is broken then
users will get the most recent unbroken INDEX instead.

> As one last question : I assume the same process of building "coherent" 
> snapshots could be also applied to the core cvs repository of the full 
> FreeBSD project, and a cvs-snap utility could be imagined ?

This process doesn't build coherent snapshots; and the same process wouldn't
work very well for anything other than ports due to a number of reasons
concerning the structure of the ports tree and the lack of structure of the
non-ports trees.

Colin Percival