[ On Wednesday, October 1, 2003 at 02:21:38 (+0700), Robert Elz wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Proposal: unification of distfiles for FreeBSD and NetBSD 
>
> No, some make available both bz2 and gz versions of the same basic
> distciof (since the bzip is smaller, and hence usually better, but
> not everyone has bzip).   There are probably still some places that
> still make .Z's available as well.

A distribution file is a distribution file, no matter what format it is
in since the distfiles mirror sites don't decompress or unpack any
distribution files.  Each different compression format or archiving
format is simply a unique distribution file and it doesn't matter that
two different distribution files might ultimately have the same
content.

If FreeBSD pulls in the *.tar.bz2 file and NetBSD pulls in the *.tar.gz
file for the same package then there are two separate distribution files
and both would be required on a merged distfiles mirror site.

I.e. some minor duplication like this is still far better than
duplicating the whole distfiles directory on a given mirror site that
might host both already.

>   | It would seem to me that such co-ordination would be downright trivial
>   | and in reality it's not critical anyway since we're only talking about
>   | mirror archives -- if some disagreement arises then the only fallout
>   | until it's resolved is that the user doing the build has to fetch the
>   | source from the original site, not one of the distfiles mirror sites.
> 
> It makes a difference to sites that create their own local mirrors,
> for their various local users (of different OSs), which I think is
> the most important point.

This only matters if you're _really_ tight on space and can't afford to
have multiple copies of the same file in different subdirectories.

But if your systems are that tight on space then you probably won't be
creating a local distfiles mirror in the first place and instead will be
always fetching distfiles from their original locations.

I've used the same local distfiles archive for both NetBSD and FreeBSD
for several years now and have never enountered any problems whatsoever.

Conceptually the merging of pkgsrc and ports distfiles mirrors into one
distfiles mirror is very much the same as using pkgsrc on different
types of platforms but with one NFS-mounted distfiles directory and then
building different sets of packages on different platforms.

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

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