On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, Charlie Root wrote:

> I have been using sup for a while to checkout and update my pkgsrc
> on my machine.  I applied the updates for imap-uw yesterday and of
> course it did not work.  I noticed the update was committed overnight.
> Now here I am almost 12 hours after the update and sup still has not
> downloaded the updates.  I even went so far as to force sup do download
> pkgsrc again.  I just tried downloading the latest pkgsrc with cvs and
> I now have the update.  The pkgsrc documentation mentions using sup,
> cvs, and the tarball for updating the pkgsrc.  I figured that at the
> very least sup and cvs would be equally accurate, is that assumption
> wrong?

Sup is updated exactly once per day, early AM California time, then
sends a message like this one to current-users:

  http://mail-index.NetBSD.org/current-users/2003/07/30/0002.html

I understand that anoncvs uses a few different mechanisms, so that it
mostly gets the changes as they're committed.

"cvs" as a tool has a few advantages over "sup". It will try to merge
local changes automatically, and alert you when it fails, so at least
they won't be lost. Then there's "cvs history", "cvs annotate", time
travel, and more. The main disadvantage is that it uses more disk I/O
on the client (and on the server), so users of older machines,
especially, complain that it's a lot slower than "sup", even though
it's actually more efficient of bandwidth.

Frederick