On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 10:47:56PM -0400, Nick Guenther wrote: > On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 8:14 PM, James Hartley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 11:16 AM, Slim Joe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> Is there a way to get package > >> info for a file not already downloaded or installed without > >> such heavy bandwidth (just the package info). > > > > Look at the -Q option on the pkg_info(1) manpage. > > > > I think he's asking for how to read package descriptions without > downloading everything. But pkg_info has to download the entirety of > each package first because a package is a compressed archive file.
Nope, that's incorrect. pkg_info will only download the beginning of the package, since it only needs the packing information, and we're very careful to store it at the beginning. Now, a lot of FTP servers tend to not like abort in the middle of transfer, especially when coupled with idiot firewalls. http transfers should be slightly better. Strangely enough, pkg transfers over scp is the fastest, due to using a specialized protocol that avoids this set-up/tear-down altogether. So what you see is very much set-up/tear-down of connections, pkg_info actually uses very little bandwidth, but it has a high latency.
