[nycbug-talk] Request for Review, Summary of FreeBSD src fetching problems

[Jesse Callaway]

Create your own SVN mirror and host it somewhere.

Provide HEAD or whatever other tags you are interested in accessible over
http/s or ftp or whatever you like. Your build environment would then need
curl or lftp instead of subversion or cvs clients. A source torrent might
not be a bad idea.

Does that work? I'm not sure what your environment and constraints are
like. I forget the FreeBSD build steps, but I think that fetching source is
an exercise left to the user and is not baked in.


On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 10:40 AM, Brett Wynkoop <nycbug at wynn.com> wrote:

> Greeting-
>
> As a VERY LONG TIME Systems Admin, as in I have been doing it longer
> than many developers have been alive my issues with the
> move to svn from cvs are totally related to SIZE & LICENSE.
> 1.  SIZE
>     It is obscene to require a source fetching tool that is so huge
>     compared to the size of the base OS.  This is especially true for
>     those of us that deal with small systems.
>
> 2.  There are times when one wants to keep NON-BSD-Licensed code off
>     of a system. I do not at this time have any need to do such a thing,
>     but in the past I had that need sometimes.
>
> When I started working with Unix full time in the early 1980s I used
> EMACS as my editor of choice.  At some point Richard got EMACS up to
> about 50Mb, which considering at the time I was running sun 4-110s with
> 120Mb disks was HUGE.  I dropped EMACS.
>
> The idea that systems administrators should be forced to
> install/maintain a huge tool to keep their systems up to date with
> source is silly at best.
>
> I believe that several years ago when portsnap was brought to life that
> a similar tool for grabbing /usr/src should have been introduced.  I
> know I would have jumped all over that.  At the time of the
> introduction of portsnap I was working at a government agency where I
> did not have control over the firewall and the network crew would not
> open up the needed ports for CVS.  I was forced to tunnel all cvsup
> traffic via an outside FreeBSD Box that was running ssh on a port
> assigned to something the firewall folks did allow.  What a pain.  Then
> came portsnap running via http and life was easier!
>
> So this begs the question why not something like "basesnap fetch"?
>
> In any case I feel that long before now the discussion of how to fetch
> base should have been started and a suitable tool should have been
> proposed and coded.  This "how to fetch base" issue shows the same lack
> of forethought exhibited by changing the system installer and breaking
> sysinstall by changing the layout of the FTP servers before the new
> installer actually worked. AFIK the new installer is still broken, but
> I have not tried to install using it since I discovered the MFSBSD iso
> images, which are small and give a simple fool proof install method.
>
> I do not know the ins and outs of svn or how hard it is to build a
> fetch tool.  I am probably not a good enough programmer to do the job
> either, but I would urge someone who is a good programmer to take on
> the problem and provide a solution before /usr/src can no longer be
> fetched with csup.
>
> -Brett
>
> --
>
> wynkoop at wynn.com               http://prd4.wynn.com/wynkoop/pgp-keys.txt
> 917-642-6925
> 718-717-5435
>
> "The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep
> and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against
> tyranny in government" - Thomas Jefferson.
>
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-- 
-jesse
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