>> The makefile usually tries a list of sites, including ftp.freeBSD.org
>
>The makefile for ytalk on ftp.freebsd.org refers solely to knot.queensu.ca;
>perhaps there is a reference to ftp.freebsd.org in FreeBSD's master makefile
>as a site of last resort, but it certainly isn't present in that makefile on
>ftp.freebsd.org.  (That *is*, at least, a valid source of ytalk, so this
>isn't the package I had trouble with.)

Look in bsd.port.mk.  Why specify the same location in every Makefile?

>> If for some reason you still can't get the tarball for the port, your
>> sources for the ports collection must be really old and you should update
>> them.
>
>I don't have any "sources" for the ports collection, unless you mean the list
>of hosts I try when looking for sources (usually I consult archie, which has
>its own problems with stale data).  The problem is that someone *else* has
>to update an archive (somewhere), and it is much too easy for one of these
>embedded links to become stale without notice to an archive maintainer.
>Note that the same problem is widespread on the WorldWide Web.

I thought you were complaining about not being able to get a port to
work from the FreeBSD ports tree.  Sorry if I was confused.

>When I had the freebsd ports scheme described to me, I thought it was really
>cool.  Unfortunately, it let me down when I finally tried to make use of it,
>in a way that exposed an important design deficiency.  Considering the benefit
>of not *having* to spend disk space replicating all of these original source
>packages, it's probably a deficiency that's quite reasonable to live with;
>that doesn't keep it from being a hole in the design, however.

Its only a problem if ftp.freebsd.org is unreachable and the original
source for the tarball has gone away.
--
Justin T. Gibbs
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  FreeBSD: Turning PCs into workstations
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