5 ms·

> I ask because Debian has a FreeBSD "port" I've used FreeBSD and before that Gentoo (which has a package manager, portage, influenced by BSDs ports system) fo

> I ask because Debian has a FreeBSD "port" I've used FreeBSD and before that Gentoo (which has a package manager, portage, influenced by BSDs ports system) for more than a decade, and I've never understood the appeal of apt or the other Debian tools. In my experience, they just don't work as well as ports, constantly require adding additional repositories (because the official repository is missing some relatively popular package for who knows what reason) - which may or may not conflict with others I have -, and in general, are just more work than ports, portage, or MacPorts. Inflicting apt on a system with a superior package management system seems like a sysadmin's bright idea - having no experience with ports or other package managers. I've used apt on several systems - Maemo, Debian, Ubuntu, OS X (as fink), and always found it to be one of the weakest package managers (I've even had better experience with yum/RPM).

jhh 13y ago
So how do you use ports in practice? Do you use sources or binary packages? Which management solution do you use, or do you just use the make files? I am constantly thinking about revisiting BSD, but in contrast to your experience I found the apt package solution to work very well and just be better.
- Freaky 13y ago
  I use poudriere and pkgng - the former for building my own package repository, the latter for installing and upgrading. The pkgng side is comparable to apt: `pkg install vim`, `pkg upgrade`, `pkg autoremove` etc; the poudriere side isn't much worse: https://fossil.etoilebsd.net/poudriere/doc/trunk/doc/pkgng_repos.wiki https://fossil.etoilebsd.net/poudriere/doc/trunk/doc/pkgng_r... I admit I had some level of apt-envy back when I was using portupgrade. pkgng has nicely eliminated that.
- harrytuttle 13y ago
  From my perspective (I'm not the GP), I will be using a custom configuration management system that I wrote back in 1999. It's. Like puppet but ssh based, written in sh and standard Unix tooling. It doesn't use a DAG so you have to order dependencies carefully. That will pull binary packages from ports builds on another machine and install and configure them.
- jonhohle 13y ago
  I install everything from source. Except for thing like desktop environments, building from source is a non-issue on modern hardware. It also gives me some confidence in the binary compatibility of the packages I have installed. For installing: pushd /usr/ports/*/$PACKAGE ; sudo make install clean && popd For upgrading (ports): sudo portsnap fetch update ; sudo portmaster -ad (In reality, portsnap is run nightly). A quick read - http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports-using.html http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/po... I use FreeBSD on a desktop at home and for a personal web server. I'm not performing large scale deployments (but if I were, I'd probably write a port for my application, define my dependencies, and install it just like anything else).
  - jon-wood 13y ago
    I'm not about to move to FreeBSD, but I did just discover pushd and popd from this comment. Thanks!
    - idupree 13y ago
      You can also use parentheses to create a scope for the current directory and environment variables (the shell forks a subprocess to run parenthesized commands). (cd /usr/ports/*/$PACKAGE ; sudo make install clean) See http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/xcu_chap02.html#tag_02_09_04 http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/xcu...
      - jonhohle 13y ago
        In your example, however, the failure of `make install clean` will put you back in the original directory and not in the port's directory where you probably want to be to debug the failure. My original example keeps you in the port's directory in the event of installation failure.
  - dscrd 13y ago
    Personally, I couldn't anymore handle the way ports asks for configuration options for every package that has configurable options. I'm spoiled by the "sane defaults" stance of better Linux distros like Arch.

jhh 13y ago

So how do you use ports in practice? Do you use sources or binary packages? Which management solution do you use, or do you just use the make files? I am constantly thinking about revisiting BSD, but in contrast to your experience I found the apt package solution to work very well and just be better.

Freaky 13y ago
I use poudriere and pkgng - the former for building my own package repository, the latter for installing and upgrading. The pkgng side is comparable to apt: `pkg install vim`, `pkg upgrade`, `pkg autoremove` etc; the poudriere side isn't much worse: https://fossil.etoilebsd.net/poudriere/doc/trunk/doc/pkgng_repos.wiki https://fossil.etoilebsd.net/poudriere/doc/trunk/doc/pkgng_r... I admit I had some level of apt-envy back when I was using portupgrade. pkgng has nicely eliminated that.
harrytuttle 13y ago
From my perspective (I'm not the GP), I will be using a custom configuration management system that I wrote back in 1999. It's. Like puppet but ssh based, written in sh and standard Unix tooling. It doesn't use a DAG so you have to order dependencies carefully. That will pull binary packages from ports builds on another machine and install and configure them.
jonhohle 13y ago
I install everything from source. Except for thing like desktop environments, building from source is a non-issue on modern hardware. It also gives me some confidence in the binary compatibility of the packages I have installed. For installing: pushd /usr/ports/*/$PACKAGE ; sudo make install clean && popd For upgrading (ports): sudo portsnap fetch update ; sudo portmaster -ad (In reality, portsnap is run nightly). A quick read - http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports-using.html http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/po... I use FreeBSD on a desktop at home and for a personal web server. I'm not performing large scale deployments (but if I were, I'd probably write a port for my application, define my dependencies, and install it just like anything else).
- jon-wood 13y ago
  I'm not about to move to FreeBSD, but I did just discover pushd and popd from this comment. Thanks!
  - idupree 13y ago
    You can also use parentheses to create a scope for the current directory and environment variables (the shell forks a subprocess to run parenthesized commands). (cd /usr/ports/*/$PACKAGE ; sudo make install clean) See http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/xcu_chap02.html#tag_02_09_04 http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/xcu...
    - jonhohle 13y ago
      In your example, however, the failure of `make install clean` will put you back in the original directory and not in the port's directory where you probably want to be to debug the failure. My original example keeps you in the port's directory in the event of installation failure.
- dscrd 13y ago
  Personally, I couldn't anymore handle the way ports asks for configuration options for every package that has configurable options. I'm spoiled by the "sane defaults" stance of better Linux distros like Arch.