On 4/10/2010 3:18 PM, k...@pcbsd.org wrote <snip>
However for my more hard-core friends, nothing stopping you from running your own ports down the road, more power to ya! For doing something like embedded work or a server this makes total sense and I think it is a huge positive for FreeBSD, no reason to trash that or break it in any way. For the other 99.9% of society who want something "that just works" for day-to-day computing, something like PBI is very attractive. It would be great to have an OS that offers best of both worlds.-- Kris Moore
There are only two possibilities with any package system. Either give the user self packaged binaries containing all shared libraries or make them update everything. Both have positives and negatives. We've been working on a new package system in MidnightBSD for some time. When we weighed this issue, it was decided that letting users have old binaries sitting around was a bad idea. It encourages a user to sit on a package for a year and not install security updates. The larger package size also deters users from downloading updates in parts of the world which have slow Internet connections. Remember the GDI+ update to windows awhile back? There were many applications that had to be updated and Microsoft had to release a scanner to search the drive for uses. There side isn't always rosy.
Obviously, there are also advantages to the larger PBI packages for users. PC-BSD is certainly easy to use.
At the end of the day, I think creating packages more frequently during releases and pushing updates like many linux distros do makes more sense in terms of security. FreeBSD has ten times the number of ports to build than we do so obviously it's a problem to build packages that frequently.
I don't want to butt in any more on this because it's not my place, but I just felt it was important to bring another perspective.
Lucas _______________________________________________ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
