[76684] trunk/dports/sysutils/rpm/Portfile

[Anders F Björklund]

Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:

> On Mar 6, 2011, at 7:16 PM, Jeremy Lavergne wrote:
> 
>> * provide dialup user valuable information about download size
>>  (can I download this now or wait for overnight)
> 
> Ah, there's the usage case I was looking for earlier, when I called into question the usefulness of the entire idea. ;-)
> 
> Hmmm.  So, presumably, our hapless dialup user can type "port getsize nmap" and quickly and easily see the size of not just nmap, but all the other deps he is going to have to download in order to build it (let's assume a fresh macports install).?  OK, that's actually a pretty reasonable thing to want to have, but it still seems to fit into the feature creep category for me.

I think the modern translation of that would be something like "can I download this now on the mobile broadband, or should I wait for wifi", but whatever.

I think we had this same discussion about the "curl -R" (remote time) implementation that we have now with the "curl -I" (head getsize) implementation too...

> The next thing that same user is going to want is a way to dump all of the URLs to all the files that would be downloaded so that he can mail himself the list and go grab them all at work, after which he also wants some sort of port distfile migrate command which copies them off of his USB thumb drive appropriately, or looks in a specific directory first, or whatever (I think we can do the latter thing already with an environment variable or something?).   Bang, you're off to the races with mostly dialup user features that nobody else cares about. :-)

Actually, outputting metalink* xml files seems rather popular ?
* http://www.metalinker.org/

Even better would be to build the ports into packages at work
(on a faster box), and then just install them later at home... ;-)

--anders