It's been a long road to recovery, but after years of mediocre releases, and months of delays in the development process, FreeBSD is finally back on its feet with 6.2-RELEASE. Though it is an excellent operating system, even this latest version offers few or no competitive advantages over Solaris or the other BSDs in a server role, and can never hope to compete with commercial GNU/Linux distributions for desktop computers. FreeBSD 6.2 is what FreeBSD 5.0 needed to be, and for those who have already switched to other operating systems, there are few or no compelling reasons to go back. More here.
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Member since:2006-05-19
but you cannot
# make package
Why not?
# portinstall -p package
# man portinstall
-p
--package
Build a package when each specified port is installed or upgraded. If a package is upgraded and its dependent packages are given from the command line (including the case where -r is specified), build packages for them as well.
Edited 2007-02-27 13:51
Member since:2006-10-08
You're right.
"Why not?"
Now, tested with lame-3.97_1, it works. Formerly it didn't because of special licensing. Nice to see this changed. I don't upgrade every application one a month, some are used since 2005, so I simply didn't notice. :-)
"# portinstall -p package
Build a package when each specified port is installed or upgraded. If a package is upgraded and its dependent packages are given from the command line (including the case where -r is specified), build packages for them as well. "
"portinstall -p foo" performs an equivalent operation of make package. It requires the port installed via "portinstall foo" or "portinstall -P foo"; the last one performs similar to "pkg_add -r foo".
Member since:
2006-10-08
"On the Desktop it has always been packages, packages, and packages. I think the biggest reason for the sucess of Linux distro (and other prop. OSs) is the fact that they make installing and maintaining packages a snap. It does not take hours to install updates."
There is a reason why PC-BSD is popular. But its limited in applications and there are questions regarding the scalability of it."
PC-BSD's PBI system fulfills this request (esp. binary OS updates), but does not offer the amount of software you could install via source, as you have recognized by yourself:
"Ports is great ... when it works and you have the time.
Your recommendation:
"If there is one recommendation I would make to the FreeBSD team it would be to create something like or adopt the rpm or apt packaging system and make a requirement that any packages that are added must be also available in binary - makeing sure that it compiles properly. (I would do this, but I don't have the skills for this)"
The idea itself is great, but there are two things to consider:
1. Some ports may not be packaged due to licenses. As fasr as I remember, you cannot
# pkg_add -r lame
but you can of course
# cd /usr/ports/audio/lame
# make install
but you cannot
# make package
2. Some ports allow a high grade of customization, which is usually done via make options stored in the respective Makefile.local. You would need a package for each possible combination of items, or at least three different packages to include { basic | somewhat advanced | all } features. But this mechanism does not consider tweaking program parameters to fit to special CPU features, which is very useful to make programs work good on older CPUs.