Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:

> On Mar 6, 2011, at 7:16 PM, Jeremy Lavergne wrote:
> 
>> * provide dialup user valuable information about download size
>>  (can I download this now or wait for overnight)
> 
> Ah, there's the usage case I was looking for earlier, when I called into 
> question the usefulness of the entire idea. ;-)
> 
> Hmmm.  So, presumably, our hapless dialup user can type "port getsize nmap" 
> and quickly and easily see the size of not just nmap, but all the other deps 
> he is going to have to download in order to build it (let's assume a fresh 
> macports install).?  OK, that's actually a pretty reasonable thing to want to 
> have, but it still seems to fit into the feature creep category for me.

I think the modern translation of that would be something like "can I download 
this now on the mobile broadband, or should I wait for wifi", but whatever.

I think we had this same discussion about the "curl -R" (remote time) 
implementation that we have now with the "curl -I" (head getsize) 
implementation too...

> The next thing that same user is going to want is a way to dump all of the 
> URLs to all the files that would be downloaded so that he can mail himself 
> the list and go grab them all at work, after which he also wants some sort of 
> port distfile migrate command which copies them off of his USB thumb drive 
> appropriately, or looks in a specific directory first, or whatever (I think 
> we can do the latter thing already with an environment variable or 
> something?).   Bang, you're off to the races with mostly dialup user features 
> that nobody else cares about. :-)

Actually, outputting metalink* xml files seems rather popular ?
* http://www.metalinker.org/

Even better would be to build the ports into packages at work
(on a faster box), and then just install them later at home... ;-)

--anders

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