> - Library mismatches leading to broken packages, sometimes > on a freshly installed system. I've always heard outright > denial that this happens, but I'v

> - Library mismatches leading to broken packages, sometimes > on a freshly installed system. I've always heard outright > denial that this happens, but I've literally never installed > a FreeBSD system that didn't end up with something broken by > the time everything needed for a fully functioning web hosting > system was installed. It's like there's Stockholm syndrome > happening, or something. I run into this less frequently than I did on rpm (CentOS, RHEL) distributions. "rpm hell" was a real thing, and still continues to a lesser degree. Try building an rpm for anything recent on an rpm distro and it is painful. > - Poor dependency resolution, and weak validation tools, that requires > manual intervention to prevent or repair those breakages which are > bound to occur. I haven't personally run into this in a long time. > - No reasonable mechanism for offering third party package repositories. pkgng does this. In fact, building entire custom package sets and repos is quite easy with poudriere and portshaker. > - Default ports are usually anemic I use fairly exotic options for some things, so I tend to build more packages than most people probably do. poudriere makes it easy to build sets with different options regularly. pkg makes creating your own repo quite easy too -- certainly moreso than setting up your own rpm repo with yum. Ports used to have all those problems you outlined (prior to round about FreeBSD 9 probably) -- hell, you couldn't even reliably mix ports and packages! It was awful. Now ports simply build packages, and those get installed with pkgng. Much cleaner.