Portsnap & Refuse Option

M

Mayhem30

Is it safe to uncomment the 2 REFUSE lines in /etc/portsnap.conf? I'm pretty sure I have nothing installed that requires those languages.
Code: 
# REFUSE arabic chinese french german hebrew hungarian japanese
# REFUSE korean polish portuguese russian ukrainian vietnamese
If I were to do that, would I just need to do a rm -rf /usr/ports/ and then portsnap fetch extract?
 
I don't use portsnap(8) and don't have it installed to consult the file but REFUSE in there apparently actually means refuse. So, it should be safe but why remove those categories?

I mean this is the kind of thing that bring very little advantage ( they use very little space ) to do, and later something may break because something depends on a port in those categories ( and you don't know ), and you get crazy trying to fix it because you forgot you removed those categories like two years ago.
 
Why not?

More importantly, why is that option even available in the config file if it makes no difference?
 
Nobody said it makes no difference, but the difference is mostly irrelevant...

There are situations when every minimal difference is a big difference, think about the enormous difference 1MB do in tiny embedded systems. Now 1MB on 99% of desktops/laptops is almost completely irrelevant and often does not worth the effort to maintain the customization to get rid of it, ever if that effort is minimal.
 
Mayhem30 said:
Is it safe to uncomment the 2 REFUSE lines
Click to expand...
Yep, it is. Mostly they are so-called `metaports` that modifies an options of the mainstream ports - adds the national fonts to the dependencies lists, f.e. But there is no reasons to refuse them as far as they very tiny against the whole tree. Literally no difference.
 
DeadLoco said:
But you have it bundled with /usr/sbin. Every FreeBSD installed from the official media - ISO/IMG/FTP/etc - has the portsnap inside.
Click to expand...
So why assume he installed it from official media? Many of us here customize our setup (read: build from source) so that it better suits our needs. And if you then look at src.conf(5) you'll see this:
Code: 
     WITHOUT_PORTSNAP
             Set to not build or install portsnap(8) and related files.
So it really isn't all that weird that lebarondemerde doesn't have portsnap installed.

In fact, I can somewhat follow up on that as well. Although my servers do have Portsnap installed all of them lack freebsd-update, ppp, svnlite, autofs, floppy support, bluetooth support and wireless support (and some other stuff I don't recall from mind).

That's the advantage of building from source; no unneeded overhead :)
 
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