CVSup and PortUpgrade

[James Elstone]

Hi All!

I have been dabbling in FreeBSD for a few months now and have been having 
the time of my life, having headed into FreeBSD from the embedded route so 
the novelty of non-Intel hardware has not yet worn off!

However, I have a few questions relating to CVSup and PortUpgrade and 
installing in general though which I am finding difficult to answer, and 
would like to help. Remember I am a newbie in this at the moment, so excuse 
the possible silly questions or possibly obvious answers:

1).  I have managed to successfully obtained the Ports collection by using 
the CVSup method as described in the forever useful handbook.  This took 
about 30 minutes and seemed to download the source code for all current 
ports that are available.  Is my assumption that I have just downloaded the 
source code for the ports correct?

2). When I installed the Portupgrade package it downloaded from the 
ftp.freebsd.org some other "packages" in a tarball for Ruby.  I installed 
Portupgrade by using "make install clean" from the 
/usr/ports/sysutils/portupgrade directory.  If I have downloaded all the 
source code in the ports structure when I executed CVSup, why does it not 
use the already downloaded code, and compile from it rather than downloading 
what seemed to be a packaged tar ball? (It kept mentioning that the 
/usr/distfiles (or something similar) were not present and that it had to 
download them...)

3). Is there a difference between a packaged tar ball (.tar.gz) that is 
downloaded in the above example or source code from the /usr/ports file 
structure?

4). How once a binary is installed can I reference it at the command line 
without specifying the full path, e.g. "portupgrade" rather than 
"/usr/local/etc/portupgrade".  I suppose what I am asking is how do I alter 
the global PATH setting?

5). Why when I am in a directory can I not just enter the binaries name, but 
instead I have to prefix "./" to it before the command is recognised, and is 
there a way to alter the behaviour so the pwd is part of the path? (I 
remember from Uni days there is a way to do this, but cannot for the life of 
me remember how!)

6). The reason I ask about the downloading of tarballs above is that the 
machine I am working on will eventually only have access to an up_to_date 
/usr/ports tree (via nfs/ftp to another internal FreeBSD node that has 
internet access and is on a DMZ?!) and no direct access to the internet.  I 
am trying to understand why the ports collection is not enough on it's own, 
and how I can overcome this issue!?!

7). When Ruby installed it took all night and some of the day to "make".  Is 
there anyway I can increase the performance on this? The machine in question 
is currently a PII-633MHz with 128Mb ram with a 20GB HD. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance for your help and guidance,

James C Elstone.