ports installed as part of FreeBSD installation

tomc

tomc

I opted to install the 'ports' collection/package as part of a fresh install of FreeBSD 9.0-BETA2; the ports were extracted into /usr/ports. Should I be able to run [cmd=]portsnap update[/cmd] in order to check for and apply updates to the 'ports' installed during the general FreeBSD installation? When I tried tried running [cmd=]portsnap update[/cmd] on my fresh install of FreeBSD I got the message
Code: 
No snapshot available.  Try running # portsnap fetch
From the little I've read [cmd=]portsnap fetch[/cmd] will download an archive of 'ports' which then has to be extracted. portsnap seems to be a convenient tool to keep 'ports' up to date, but I'm thinking I would have saved some time by not installing the 'ports' collection during the installation of FreeBSD since [cmd=]portsnap fetch[/cmd] and [cmd=]portsnap extract[/cmd] will download and overwrite the existing 'ports' installation. Is the advantage of offering the 'ports' collection during the installation of FreeBSD that it gets an initial set of 'ports' on a system where the 'ports' are going to be updated/synced using something like cvs?
 
Guessing portsnap does not work on v9. (Probably wrong; packages-9-stable are upstream at the repositories...). The installation advantage is installing the ports tree (Ignoring portsnap for the moment). Then one can use csup (in base) or net/cvsup ... and the various package-fetching port-building tools and commands, once set up, tested, etc. Originally the less-than-56k-dialup ports install was a huge timesaver...
 
To answer the question: if you're on any reasonably snappy Internet connection, just run [cmd=]portsnap fetch extract[/cmd] and don't use the ports tree on the CD/DVD/ISO. It's already outdated when it ships. It's there for convenience, its use is not mandatory.
 
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