Adding distfiles to the repository

[Rainer Müller]

Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> I think we should not add distfiles to the Subversion repository  
> anymore. They take up lots of room. I could make thousands of  
> portfile edits in the amount of disk space used by a single distfile.  
> I would rather use 1K in the repository to add a new distfiles mirror  
> to the portfile than use 5MB to store a copy of the distfile. There  
> is "no way" to remove data from the repository "ever" [1] so it has  
> always seemed like the wrong place to put distfiles. And thankfully  
> we now have a much better solution in the distfiles mirror. I think  
> the only reason to add a distfile to the repository is if the  
> distfiles mirror is unable to mirror it for some technical reason,  
> and that should be rare.

I agree with you. Subversion repositories are not a good place to 
archive non-changing binary data.

But there is currently no way to add a file to the distfiles mirror if 
all of the original master_sites are not available any more. This was 
the case for iso-codes.

To add the file to the distfiles mirror, it has to be online somewhere, 
so 'port mirror' can pick it up. The subversion repository is the 
easiest way to add a local copy, as it is automatically in master_sites 
as fallback.

Rainer