On Wed, 6 Mar 1996, David Brownlee wrote:

> 	What is _really_ needed is to take on FreeBSD's 'ports' mechanism
> 	(I wish to hell they'd picked a different name.. but...)
> 
> 	Where you can cd into a directory (which contains the patches for
> 	a given program and where to get the source) and type 'make'.
> 	If the source is not locally present it will ftp it back, then
> 	apply the patches, then build.
> 
> 	Given the multi-arch nature of NetBSD this is _so_ much better
> 	suited than binary packages.
> 
> 	With the exception of the name - is there any reason why NetBSD
> 	hasn't picked up on this?

Well...I have. It's fairly trivial to get working under NetBSD.
I took the ports-2.1 tree and have it working for most of the net and 
archive software. It's just that it's very labor intensive going through
all the patches with instances of 'ifdef __FreeBSD__', new rev's, etc.
I have a few more minor problems to work out, then I'll have an 
announcement of "volunteers needed".

Jonathan

P.s. If there's any CVS gurus out there who'd like to give me some
     pointers on the best way to setup the repository...

> 
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