I apologise if this has been discussed before. The ports collection seems to be growing at alarming rates. On one hand, this is very good; on the other, it has the unfortunate downside of having to store ten billion little files on one's hard drive. The current size of the ports collection is 300+Mb (the output of du -ks /usr/ports); the actual size could be greater, considering that most of the files are smaller than 512 bytes.
Now this is perhaps a silly thought, but wouldn't it be more sensible to have just one Makefile for each port? All such a Makefile would have to do is download its port skeleton (on demand), and then do a make in that skeleton's directory. After that, everything should be the same as it is now. Well, the ports collection is manageable now (although it takes AGES to download/cvsup), but will it be in the future? Just a thought. Dean To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
