very short overview of FreeBSD packages (fwd)

[Scott Robbins]

On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 09:43:00PM -0500, Scott Robbins wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 09:03:47PM -0500, David Billsbrough wrote:
> > In a short response to an email I wrote:
> >  
> > > I am attempting to explain ports/packaging in FreeBSD
> > >  https://www.dropbox.com/s/q07d2ah7zlyv8d0/ports_and_packages.txt
> > > Did I mangle it too bad?
> 
> The question is, what do they mean?  Do they mean the fact that it can
> literally take hours to install what may take a few moments in Linux?  Do
> they mean that they may have installed a package, then installed a port to
> find that it insisted on redoing everything the package did?  

Y'know, I'd forgotten about the time when there was a security breach, and
for awhile, there were no packages available, and then, while the handbook
was recommending pkgng, there were no packages available for that.  That
_might_ have been what your friend was referring to.  If that's the case,
then the answer is Yes, they've fixed their package woes.  

While there aren't (and I'm sure this will always be the case) packages
available for absolutely everything, things like firefox, as an example of a package
that many who use X will consider essential and take a long time to build,
are available in package form for FreeBSD-10.  Right now  (or as of
yesterday evening) the big missing package is xorg-server, but many of hte
other common X programs are already avaialable as packages.  (For those who
haven't kept up, it's now pkg install, not pkg_add -r, and nothing needs to
be added to make.conf, nor do you still need to create a
/usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf file)

-- 
Scott Robbins
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