On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 12:40:00PM -0800, John Refling wrote:
> 
> I was following the discussion on the massive explosion
> of the quantity of small files in pkgsrc and the length
> of TIME it takes to extract it.  I actually ran out of
> inodes (I have syssrc, src, and pkgsrc extracted) when
> extracting another copy of pkgsrc.
> 
> I had a *CRAZY* idea which may be an option for SOME
> people... it works well for me:
> 
> Take the pkgsrc.tar.gz and convert it to a filesystem image
> compatible with vnd:
> 
> dd if=/dev/zero of=pkgsrc.vnd bs=1m count=90
> vnconfig /dev/vnd0d pkgsrc.vnd
> disklabel -e -I vnd0
> newfs -m 0 -o space -i 1024 /dev/rvnd0d
> mount /dev/vnd0d /mnt
> tar -C /mnt -zxf /mnt pkgsrc.tar.gz
> umount /mnt
> vnconfig -u /dev/vnd0d
> 
> [may need 0c throught instead of 0d on non-i386 systems].
> 
> The above is done once, then, at any time you can
> 
> vnconfig /dev/vnd0d pkgsrc.vnd
> mount -r /dev/vnd0d /mnt
> 
> and have the entire extracted pkgsrc available INSTANTLY.
> 
> There are occasions where this is useful... ie, I create the
> vnd image once on a fast machine, then bring it to my other
> slower non-internetted machines.

A nice idea, but I'm not sure what it buys you over an NFS exported
pkgsrc partition from your fast machine to your slower machines (aside
from not depending on NFS).

Am I missing something?

Regards,
Alistair