On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 09:12:51AM -0800, Ben Munat wrote: > Yeah, I saw that... however, the motivation here is lack of cutting edge > stuff in portage. Ironically, the portage tools are what I'd miss the most > in switching, but what I can -- and can't -- get with those tools is the > big issue.
If you're looking for cutting-edge, *BSD is *not* where you want to go. Many, many packages in FreeBSD-RELEASE or OpenBSD-STABLE are far less recent than those in portage. I'm a pretty big OpenBSD afficianado and I am running FreeBSD right now and I can tell you they have their own set of issues. With OpenBSD, the biggest thing (to me) is that Apache 2.x isn't supported --- at all. You are entirely on your own. However, they have the best system documentation system out there, both in man pages and the code itself, and most of the time, things Just Work (TM). Also, the OpenBSD community is significantly smaller (with reason, but that's a whole other posting) so new stuff (and sometimes fixes) don't get done as fast. With FreeBSD, you've got a pretty large user-base and community. You get the same feeling of things Just Work (TM) a lot of the time. AFAIK, the ports collection can do a lot of what portage does (want to see dependencies? Just do `cd /usr/ports/www/apache2; make pretty-print-build-depends-list` like this: [02.09.05 8:56:16 [EMAIL PROTECTED] apache2]$ make pretty-print-build-depends-list This port requires package(s) "autoconf-2.59_2 expat-1.95.8 libiconv-1.9.2_1 libtool-1.5.8 m4-1.4.1 perl-5.8.5" to build. Of course, this is all documented in the "ports" manpage. The other emails in this thread all have very good points to make and some good advice. Here's mine: Stick with Gentoo. It sounds to me like you (or your partner) might be looking to vent some frustration by switching. I've done the same thing *many* times, and believe me; it doesn't help you in the long run. Portage takes the best of ports and adds some modern package-management techniques to it --- I can't tell you how many times I accidentally typed "qpkg" on my BSD systems. Emerge sync is a whole lot easier than setting up cvsup. Things that has been a *major* winner for me as far as system admin stuff goes are the helper scripts that Gentoo includes (rc-add, rc-status, java-config, gcc-config, etc-update, dispatch-etc, , env-update, equery, etc, etc, etc), the way system configuration is set up (/etc/conf.d/*, /etc/env.d/*, etc, etc, etc), and many other little things (I don't care what people say about genkernel. I love it) that make life easier than they would be on a *BSD system. I don't have to spend very much time administering my Gentoo systems because of all the little things. BSD takes much more time and effort, in my experience. So, to sum up an email that got much longer than I intended: Stick with Gentoo. From what you've described, I don't know of a system that would better suit your needs. bc -- Benjamin A. Collins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://people.cs.tamu.edu/bcollins/
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