On Tue, 08 Nov 2005 00:49:18 +0100, Alistair
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hello, All
I am a user of Linux for many years (and an aged BSD sysadmin from
1985-1989), but laterly mainly use Gentoo. FreeBSD seemed to be a good
alternative, so I get the 6.0 release a few days after it was released.
Being a Gentoo person, I like the ports system, but with limited time on
my hands, I also like the compiled packages. I can get a working system
from packages then compile my own ports as need or want be. Or so I
thought.
I installed from two CDs, and got a working KDE system. Now, I want to
do Firefox from ports with my own make.conf for P4 optimisation. Good!
So, I sync with the sources using cvsup (just like emerge --sync)
change to the Firefox ports directory, type "make" and enter dependency
hell like has never been known before. Everything that depends upon
GTK2 must be updated before Firefox can be compiled!
I thought that FreeBSD would be more stable than Gentoo and Linux
distros in general. I now find that there is the most major release
step (5.4 to 6.0) and within a matter of a few days later, both Gnome
and KDE are subject to huge updates that require many hours (or maybe
days - it's not done yet) of CPU time.
Maybe I am missing something. However, I just cannot see why this is
right. What I thought that FreeBSD would give me that Gentoo did not is
a coherent system within which deveopment was co-ordinated. Instead, I
seem to find the opposite. The core group can offer a major release of
the OS, while missing the fact that two hugely important development
groups are just days off their own major releases.
The portstree is tagged for a release, so if you cvsup to the tag for the
release, you get the 'supported' ports. If you cvsup to the most recent
portstree there is always a change for a big update.
The idea behind the KDE/GNOME update is to commit the stuff after the
6.0-RELEASE in stead of before too have stable KDE/GNOME packages in the
release.
BTW: use the port sysutils/portupgrade. This fixes a lot of dependency
troubles.
BTW2: if you cvsup to the latest portstree, you can't expect everything to
be available in packages. In FreeBSD ports are the focus, packages come
next (currently).
BTW3: http://www.freshports.org/
Ronald.
--
Ronald Klop
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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