said by scarney :

having to switch discs back and forth multipule times

said by sporkme :

That one's got me stumped, I've never gone beyond the first CD.

said by rexbinary :

I updated to 6.1 and noticed that portsnap was in the docs now but I haven't tried it out yet. What is the advantage of using portsnap rather then cvsup if you don't mind me asking?

said by shrtckt1 :

The only advantage I see is that is is easier for someone that is new to freebsd to install a ports tree & keep it synced until they learn how to setup & use cvsup correctly.

Portsnap is a system for securely downloading and updating a compressed snapshot of the FreeBSD ports tree, and using this compressed snapshot to extract or update a (uncompressed) copy of the ports tree. Historically, most people have used CVSup to keep their ports tree up to date, but CVSup has a number of limitations:

* CVSup is insecure. The protocol uses no encryption or signing, and any attacker who can intercept the connection can insert arbitrary data into the tree you are updating.
* CVSup isn’t end-to-end. Related to the previous point, this means that anyone who can compromise a CVSup mirror can feed arbitrary data to the people who are using that mirror.
* CVSup isn’t designed for frequent small updates. While CVSup is very good at distributing CVS trees, and is very efficient for updating a tree which has been significantly changed (eg, by a month or more of commits), it transmits a list of all the files in the tree, which makes it quite inefficient if only a few files have changed.
* CVSup uses a custom protocol. This can cause problems for people behind firewalls – outgoing connections on port 5999 need to be permitted – and it needs a heavyweight server (cvsupd).

Portsnap avoids these problems by operating over HTTP (using FreeBSD’s fetch(1) utility and a new experimental pipelined HTTP client), signing the snapshots using OpenSSL, and using more sophisticated delta compression to distribute the snapshots.