Adding bsdiff to the base system
Colin Percival
colin.percival at wadham.ox.ac.uk
Thu Mar 31 02:46:30 PST 2005
Alexey Dokuchaev wrote:
> I also want to ask if there're enough reasons to bring portsnap and
> its dependencies into the base. What's wrong with having it in ports?
> It does not seem to be used/needed for vast majority of our user base,
> or am I wrong?
I'll conceed that portsnap is not yet used by the majority of our user
base; but I think that is largely because portsnap is still quite new,
and thus relatively unknown. At present portsnap is the only mechanism
available by which most users can securely maintain an up-to-date copy
of the FreeBSD ports tree; it also provides some other advantages over
cvsup (reduced bandwidth and ports INDEX/INDEX-5/INDEX-6 files). Since
portsnap and its dependencies will not significantly bloat the base
system -- portsnap + bsdiff weigh in at a combined 54kB -- I think it
is a sufficiently useful tool to justify inclusion.
When you consider that cvsup is a classic example of a program which is
only excluded from the base system as a result of its dependencies, and
portsnap makes cvsup unnecessary for most users, the case is even clearer.
Colin Percival
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