"After using PC-BSD several days, I was impressed with how easy it is to use. It's a good desktop OS, and a great way to introduce BSD to new users. The 1.0 release has a few rough edges, but nothing that should scare off prospective users. For the future, I'd like to see something like Synaptic to manage PBI packages and allow users to browse for software without having to visit the PC-BSD Web site, and it would be nice if the site had a little more documentation, but I expect such things will come along in due time as the project matures."
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Member since:2005-09-10
Glad to be of help 
What you describe in installing "xtinyapp" is partly true. There is a ports freeze period that precedes each release, and once a Release is out of the door, pending updates are commited. Also, whether or not you have to upgrade most apps depends on how soon you install after a release is made: for instance, if you install FreeBSD 6.0 right now, probably all the installed packages will be updated when you install a new port. This is simply because the ports tree is tested as a whole. This is a tradeoff - a single ports tree supporting multiple releases, from very old ones like 4.x to 7-CURRENT, and the difference between 4.x and CURRENT is HUGE - most major FreeBSd subsystems has been rewritten. This is analogous to supporting Mandrake 8.0 and a Mandriva cooker from the same repository!
There is a solution howerer: someone wrote it here in this thread, that you can point your PKG_SITE variable to a repository of binary packages that contain the recent software, then use portupgrade -PP -a first (this will pull only updates that have binary packages available - "-P" will try binary first, and if not available, use ports). Then you can install your "xtinyapp" - with fewer upgrades. Even if you intend to use ports exclusively, you have to be aware that the massive upgrade you noticed is a one time job. Once your installed ports/packages are at the version of your current ports tree, you install software as normal. I would chose this latter route - read /usr/ports/UPDATING, than portupgrade -a (and go into a pub while it finishes the job, like someone suggested 
. After that, you install ports like in gentoo. man ports, man portupgrade explain a lot of things, they are very well written, and - to me at least - a lot more easier to grasp than portage's concepts.
Member since:
2006-02-10
FreeBSD ports miss information about versions (package abc requires def >=2.5). So, either you recompile all dependencies,.FreeBSD ports miss information about versions (package abc requires def >=2.5). So, either you recompile all dependencies,,,
No, not really - there are some occasions when you have to update related ports, but these are the exceptions, always notified in /usr/ports/UPDATING.
It's true I hadn't picked up the habit of reading this file. Thanks for the tip. If I remember correctly though "portinstall" (not portupgrade) always insisted on upgrading dependencies - so you install "xtinyapp" and suddenly you have to upgrade x.org to its latest version.
I'll try *BSD again though, this time using binaries and all the shiny tools (portsnap, portaudit). Maybe this time ports will work for me, because I was otherwise very pleased with it.