Re: Too much metadata?

[Norton Allen <allen%huarp.harvard.edu@localhost>]

Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 12:49:51PM -0500, Norton Allen wrote:
>   
>> I'm interested in building a handful of packages which are supplied
>> through pkgsrc. Is it true that I have to download metadata for every
>> package every conceived before I can build the package I want?
>>     
>
> You have to get the full pkgsrc tree, there is no support for having
> only a subset. This is different for binary packages though.
>   
Has the possibility of eliminating that requirement been discussed?
Offhand, it doesn't seem like it would be that hard to work
around--which I say having admittedly not even begun to look into it. If
it's obvious why this can't work, forgive me for wasting bandwidth.

I ask because I have wasted more than a day trying to get started with
pkgsrc in order to build a single package. I was originally thwarted by
the size of the distribution (i.e. it would be helpful if there was some
notice somewhere of how much disk space is required.) then my filesystem
ran out of inodes due to tons of small files. Now the host that I'm
downloading from seems to be bandwidth limiting, and only allows my
about 30 seconds of download before stopping.

None of this is pkgsrc's problem, so pardon my whining, but it does
represent an unnecessary barrier to entry. Presumably you would like
maintainers of single packages to work with pkgsrc, but if getting into
the game requires dedicating gigabytes of storage and gigabytes of
network transfer regardless of how small a package you maintain, there
will be folks who just can't afford it.