On Thu, Feb 03, 2000 at 10:12:21PM -0500, George Coulouris wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> My apologies if this sort of idea has come up before.
> 
> If I'm wearing my end-user hat, one of the things that always puzzled me
> about NetBSD (and FreeBSD) is the necessity to download and continually
> synchronize the pkgsrc (ports) tree.
> 
> Is the following sparse pkgsrc tree model viable?

The tradeoff is between what is available locally and what you need a 
net connection for.

Having a browsable pkgsrc tree lets you pick what you need, with COMMENTs
and DESCRs to help you along. If you don't need those because you know 
which packages you need, you don't need a tree at all - you could use 
binary packages. (Even better with Hubert's recent wildcard changes.)

I had thoughts before that one option between yours and the current
situation, would be a way to keep pkgsrc.tgz around, and a utility
to browse packages from the compressed file, and extract the pkgsrc
for ones you wanted.

-- 
David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net -->
If you don't spend energy getting what you want,
	You'll have to spend it dealing with what you get.
					      - Unknown