"Also your statement about checks on packages is simply wrong. Why wouldn't you be able to?" Because you couldn't until quite recently, as far as I know. As fa

"Also your statement about checks on packages is simply wrong. Why wouldn't you be able to?" Because you couldn't until quite recently, as far as I know. As far as I can tell signify, which seems to be what enables signed packages and file signatures, shipped with OpenBSD 5.5. My knowledge is out of date...but if you've been using ports for 10 years, you should remember the time when it was not possible. You should also remember a time when most of my complaints were true, even if they are not, now. It does appear that my knowledge on the subject of OpenBSD ports is out of date, and I'm sorry for spreading misinformation on several points above. It wasn't my intention to simply trash talk ports...I've been hoping someone would fix it for decades, but, it's only recently (in the last ~5 years) actually started to happen. I apparently just wasn't paying attention when it did. "Package Managers are no intrusion detection systems. If you use them like that you may want to overthink that approach." I've done a lot of post-intrusion detective work. On a system that does not have an IDS, it's awesome to be able to compare the installed packages to a known-good RPM or deb. It's more complicated than simply "rpm -V", but not much more, and it can be done without having an IDS configured before the intrusion happened. I can see how if your packages were built custom for the system, this would not be useful (you couldn't verify against a known good version from the web, as it would be unique to your system). But, it's also useful for non-security purposes. Dumb mistakes, like permission and ownership. I'm glad pkg_check adds these features to OpenBSD ports.