He's gotten to the point -- helped along by a couple portage gaffes lately (PHP/SNMP conflict causing apache not to start, a MySQL upgrade killing libmysqlclient and breaking a number of apps, and my struggles (though probably my fault) with courier the other day) -- where he wants to explore other options. A *nix-geek friend of his has been raving about FreeBSD... and I have to admit that just about everything I've looked for is in the ports collection.
However, since I've been doing 99% of the maintenance of this server, I want to know what I'm in for. So, I'm curious if anyone on the list also runs or has run FreeBSD? If so, what were your impressions? What pitfalls are there? What are the big differences? If you left BSD for Gentoo, why?
It seems like the ports collection offers everything that portage does (it was the inspiration for portage, after all), but their devs are making the latest versions available and stable faster. Is doing "cvsup" is really the same as "emerge sync" and "make install" in a given apps directory the same as "emerge <thatapp>"? Seems like FreeBSD is a winner... what's the catch?
Any and all thoughts welcome...
b
