On Sat, Jan 26, 2008 at 12:00:22PM +0100, Marc Espie wrote: >> As a possibly complimentary idea to PKG_CACHE, I wrote a simple script a >> while back which bulk downloads packages: > You don't need this script to minimize service down time. > > The normal way to slurp down packages of on an installed machine is to run > pkg_add -uin with PKG_CACHE set (in fact, I had to tweak pkg_add -n > behavior right after implementing PKG_CACHE to make sure it would download > the whole package). > > Then, once your full set is downloaded, you can pkg_add them.
Even better - I can drop that script (it's quite old, and predates pkg_add -u IIRC)! I am a huge fan of the pkg_* tools, and their improvement over the time I have used OpenBSD has been nothing short of incredible. The only issue I have with pkg_add is that I find the options overwhelming (e.g. -r and -u confuse me every time, as a quick read of the man page suggests they do virtually the same thing). When you say "the normal way" I expect most people had no idea that -uin and PKG_CACHE in combination do the right thing. Perhaps this could be added to the man page or the FAQ so it can become the normal way? I'm sure you know a number of useful tricks with the pkg_* tools that the rest of us remain sadly ignorant of, and it would be great if such things became more widely known. Of course, it's entirely possible that I'm the only person who didn't realise that the above was possible, in which case please pretend I never said anything :) Laurie -- http://tratt.net/laurie/ -- Personal http://convergepl.org/ -- The Converge programming language
