Reason why default rsync URL was changed to a tarball

[Clemens Lang]

Hi,

----- On 19 Jul, 2016, at 17:09, Ryan Schmidt ryandesign at macports.org wrote:

> The commit message says "make sync and selfupdate via signed tarballs the
> default"
> 
> Was signing support the only reason for this change? On one of my systems with
> an evidently slow disk, "sudo port sync" takes several minutes to complete,
> spent mostly on decompressing the tarball, even, I think, if the tarball is
> unchanged, whereas using the old rsync URL, "sudo port sync" is very quick
> since it only has to write the changes to disk and not the entire ports
> collection each time.

I've noticed the same thing, but I don't see an alternative. We don't provide
a signature for the non-tarball variant and rsync isn't encrypted or otherwise
authenticated, so the non-tar version is significantly worse.

May there is a flag we could pass to tar to only extract new or changed files
that would speed up this process?

-- 
Clemens Lang