Sorry, I really don't want to talk badly about apt. I don't think it's a bad system, but all the examples you gave are things where people tend to run into horr

Sorry, I really don't want to talk badly about apt. I don't think it's a bad system, but all the examples you gave are things where people tend to run into horrible problems, things that wouldn't have happened if they used ports. I don't think I completely understand the second statement. Sounds like a system like poudriere and similar to me. Also you can do the same on per-port basis. I do that, for example when I want to install a package that got released a minute ago I simply update the like that has the package version with the new one and install it. This works out great. That package is then like any other package on the system, and can be cleanly removed, or upgraded from into a newer upstream release, etc. Especially on edge cases ports and packages seem to work way better than yum/apt, cause the complexity and the number of things that break is lower. Also how packages work is easily comprehensible (something I always enjoyed about Arch Linux too). This isn't exactly true for .deb or .rpm. Hotfixes are another great example where ports are superior. As described above the formats in which ports are described are incredibly easy compared to how things work in the RPM/DEB world. We don't have many sysop people at our company, so time for that is precious. Using FreeBSD and its ports system actually reduced the overhead on package-related stuff a lot.