Hi,

I have FreeBSD on my stationary PC and NetBSD on my laptop. Both
work very good and their ports/pkgsrc are updated nicely.

I have a slow network connection and I built packages I need first
on FreeBSD. When I tried to do the same thing on NetBSD, it came
out that even, when both BSDs have the same versions of software
in ports/pkgsrc, they use different EXTRACT_SUFXs (not to mention,
FreeBSD has a bit different directory structure for distfiles).

My proposal is: could we, with some additional work, try to have
the same distfiles for each of BSDs? This would not only spare
the users download time (or work to correct EXTRACT_SUFX / DISTDIR),
but this could possibly reduce the need for distfile mirrors.
FreeBSD also uses bzip2 compression, which is slightly better,
than gzip - but, as we all know, is much slower.

I could submit some patches against pkgsrc to have same distfiles, as
FreeBSD has. Why wouldn't I change FreeBSD ports collection? 
FreeBSD seems to be a bit more popular, than NetBSD is - that
means it has more mirror servers, than NetBSD - at least, in Poland.

I wonder what do you think about this topic. I never used BSD
on anything else, than i386 - but I don't think there can be
architecture-specific problems, when it comes to gzip/bzip2.

Regards,
-- 
Micha³ Pasternak :: http://pasternak.w.lub.pl
$ mv /Almo /var