Hello!

First, I don't know very much about NetBSD's package collection internals,
I'm just speculating.

On Wed, 3 Jan 2001 hubert@feyrer.de wrote:

> Comments?
> 
While it is of course a gain, I don't think that eliminating less than 1/5
inodes will solve the problem permamently. Few new packages and we will
reach (hopefully) old number of inodes before the summer.

Perhaps another scheme could be developed.

Something like `make tars' command.

`make tars' in /usr/pkgsrc would pack every directory into separate .tar
file. For example: sysutils/screen -> sysutils/screen.tar.

Makefile structure would need to be rearranged to allow on-demand
unpacking (perhaps, it would be easier to have sysutils/screen/Makefile
and sysutils/screen/pkg.tar for that reason - and perhaps
sysutils/screen/README.html as well).

Of course it is meant to be solution for end users only. Nothing will
change in CVS repository and on machines of developers and people updating
pkgsrc with CVS. Distribution with tar files would be accessible through
rsync and pkgsrc.tar.gz. (Perhaps better make target would be simply
named `make distrib' then)

As I said, I'm no pkgsrc expert so I surely missed lots of issues, but I
think that at least replacing patches and files dirs with patches.tar and
files.tar files would be pretty straightforward.


What do you think? Does it make sense?


	Witold J. Wnuk



PS: and one day on-demand downloading could be implemented as well, but it
is another story. ;)