Ports (was Re: The First Linux Distro?)

[Jason Stephenson]

Bill McGonigle wrote:
> As to 'most stable' I've run into unresolvable and/or circular 
> dependency problems with both rpm and dpkg (dpkg more) so frequently of 
> late that I'm about to give up on that method.  Nice idea, but 'works 
> sometimes' isn't quite enough.  I'm interested in finding out if ports 
> does any better.  But since Slackware doesn't attempt such feats it 
> doesn't suffer such problems, so from that perspective it is more stable.

I use FreeBSD on two of my computers at home, my main workstation and my 
web/email server. I also use OpenBSD on my gateway/firewall. Ports do 
solve most dependency problems that you encounter with rpm and dpkg. 
Occasionally, I have run into a certain port, mysql++ comes to mind, 
that assumes you have a different version of a dependency installed, but 
in those cases, I've had an easy time modifying the Makefile to look for 
the other version of the package. (Usually that means checking for a 
different library or header version.) When I find these issues I send a 
patch to the port maintainer. Of course, that's not so easy for folks 
who aren't programmers.

You can also install pre-compiled packages of things that are available 
in ports. This works a lot like installing packages on Slack. (I ran 
Slackware for 4 years before switching to FreeBSD.) You'll occasionally 
run into problems with dependencies, and they're harder to fix in binary 
distributions than with ports, so I pretty much install everything from 
ports.

Rebuilding your system, by which I mean updating system source and 
application source and then recompiling it all from scratch, can take 
quite a long time. I often set aside a good part of a weekend for a 
complete source upgrade for my two machines. However, I do believe that 
the benefits are worth the trade off in time. I don't think that I'd 
switch my home machines back to a system that relied heavily on binary 
packages after using ports. It has become so much a habit of how I work.

Cheers,
Jason