cvsup vs. portsnap (was Re: cvsup problem)

[Andrew P.]

On 11/10/05, Colin Percival <cperciva at freebsd.org> wrote:
> Andrew P. wrote:
> > There are a couple more points against portsnap:
> > - it lags behind by a few hours.
>
> This is true (well, 1-2 hours).  However, the reason for this
> is that portsnap builds ports INDEX files, and since portsnap
> is usually more up-to-date than the INDEX files fetched by
> "make fetchindex", the lag time is probably less of a problem
> than one might imagine at first.
>
> That said, the build times should be improving somewhat as I
> move portsnap builds to some new hardware in the near future.
>
> > - setting up a mirror is still undocumented
>
> I'm working on it; but for most users, a caching HTTP proxy
> will be far better than an actual portsnap mirror.
>
> Colin Percival
>

satbsd# date
Fri Nov 11 00:11:04 MSK 2005
satbsd# portsnap fetch
Fetching snapshot tag... done.
Fetching snapshot metadata... done.
Updating from Thu Nov 10 02:28:12 MSK 2005 to Thu Nov 10 21:14:57 MSK 2005.
Fetching 4 metadata patches... done.
...

That's 3 hours, and I often see more. But that doesn't
really matter (as in "really really"). Portsnap still would
have saved many lives even if it lagged by a week, and
I think that some humble hardware donation just might
solve the problem by cutting down even those 3 hours.