Users and I have noted selfupdate is slow. Our ports collection has grown, and for many years we no longer just rsync the ports tree, which was fast, but instead rsync a tarball which we then decompress, which involves throwing away and recreating the tens of thousands of files that make up the entire ports tree each time.
Can we speed it up and reduce local disk space usage by not unpacking the tarball at sync time? Maybe we could keep the portindexes and _resources folder on disk but leave everything else in the tarball until it's asked for, e.g. untar the port's directory into the work directory when the user asks to install that port. Or, any other ideas for speeding up selfupdate?
