Re: Adding bsdiff to the base system

From: Colin Percival (colin.percival_at_wadham.ox.ac.uk)
Date: 03/31/05

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    Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2005 02:46:19 -0800
To: Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe@nsu.ru>

    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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