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BSD based Unix systems have this for along time.
Both in the base system, and for 3rd party software.

Base system example:
http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdwe...

Then again, there's not much need for "autoconf"-like system environment detection there. The actual build system is also in a lot of Makefile snippets in the share/mk directory:
http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdwe...

For 3rd party software that's build from a make-based system, see http://www.pkgsrc.org/

I can think of three ways to obtain a copy of GCC in executable form

The topic was not, how to obtain a compiler, but whether or not to compile an application — Firefox — from source. The compiler is part of the operating system — if it is any good, anyway... The bootstrapping of compiler — and whether it can be trusted — is a fine theoretical discussion, but that's not, what I was talking about...

A program usually depends on the presence of several other programs, often called "libraries".

Libraries, most certainly, aren't programs. But, yes, I get it — there are dependencies.

But most people prefer the convenience of using a program that automates finding and installing libraries on which a program depends, as well as automating repeating the process when the author publishes one or more security updates for said program.

Yes, automation is where it is at, and computers are especially good at it — if they are good at anything.

But automation does not imply usage of pre-built binaries. Far from it. That very search for the zip/tar-balls, the downloading of same, extraction, patching, configuring (this is where you'd enable things like ALSA!), compiling, installing (and preparing for uninstall) can all be automated as well...

Indeed, this is exactly, how FreeBSD does it with its "ports" system — admiringly replicated by pkgsrc, MacOS' "macports", and some Linux systems (such as portage).

If all you've got on your choice of OS is either using binaries somebody else compiled for you or a completely unaided manual rebuild, your choice was really poor...

Portage is just a half-arsed imitation of pkgsrc. The smart thing to do is to use pkgsrc directly.

No dependency tracking.

If you want dependency tracking, you can install pkgsrc for Linux, as I did.

To anyone who really digs the Slackware way, the concept of a distro-mandated packaging system simply doesn't make any sense.

e) Standardise around pkgsrc for package management.

How is pkgsrc better than ports and/or portage?

a) Decide once and for all; client or server? If client, (which is what the desktop is) embrace that completely. Tell anyone who wants UNIX that they need to move to *BSD.

b) For sound, return to OSS. v4 is under the GPL now, so there's no reason not to. ALSA is over-engineered, unstable garbage. Get rid of it.

c) Standardise around GNOME. For my money it's the least bloated of the big two. In terms of features, truthfully I probably like KDE more, but it needs to lose weight before I'd advocate it.

d) Stop standardising around Debian, and stop listening to whoever keeps telling everyone to do so. Debian/Ubuntu are the two most poorly designed Linux distributions in existence. If fanboys want to respond to that, fine, but if I list my issues with Debian, I expect you to respond to me on those issues specifically, without simply resorting to the old standby of telling me that I'm ignorant.

e) Standardise around pkgsrc for package management. It's portable, it's solid, it has a lot of features, and it's written by people who, unlike many Linux developers, both care about design quality AND can actually code their way out of a wet paper bag. Do not listen to Debian fanboys who attempt to say otherwise.

f) Stop caring AT ALL about what the FSF thinks. If nVidia only distribute binary drivers, people are going to want them, period; and are going to use them, irrespective of what the cult decrees. I also don't want to hear from FSF cultists in response to this, either. I don't agree with you now, I'm not going to in the future, I think your organisation is a disease, and is the single worst thing about Linux, and I'd be much happier if it didn't exist, putting it bluntly; so don't bother.

g) If money is what it takes to cause FOSS developers to get serious, then so be it. Relicense under more commercially friendly licenses, (like the BSD license, for instance) and form companies around the relevant applications.

h) If the desktop is where the Linux community has decided it wants to go, Linus needs to be brought into line with that vision. At the moment, he is primarily concerned about big iron, because that is what the corporate hands that feed him primarily care about. If you want the i386 client desktop, that is where you need to put the entirety of your focus. Forget portability, forget the server, and focus purely on being an i386 client desktop. You're not going to get there any other way.

If you're going to the length of building from source yourself, you might also want to try pkgsrc.org, depending on your needs.

They should adopt the FreeBSD ports system or NetBSD's pkgsrc. Pkgsrc already has some support for Solaris. Even with just a little bit of support from Sun, it would far exceed the capabilities and quality of apt.

Exactly my thought. There should be a system with the Linux kernel and the FreeBSD userland (ports mainly, but rc.conf and init scripts would be nice as well). I've heard that pkgsrc is a ports look-alike, designed to be portable across many operating systems, including Linux, but I haven't seen any Linux distro using it. The closest seems to be ArchLinux (which uses BSD-style init), but they have their own, incompatible, package management tools.

Gentoo's portage would be nice if it weren't so damn slow...

Your post reminds me of one of the main reasons I don't use Windows: I don't want to deal with companies like Microsoft, Symantec, McAfee and Adobe.

My data is too valuable to become victim to the insecure software of Microsoft. My time is too valuable to be wasted trying to clear my system of malware.

My system's performance is too important to be hindered by anti-virus software, be it from Symantec, McAfee, or any other anti-virus software vendor.

I also do not want to use crash-prone software like Adobe Acrobat Reader, which often takes down the web browser when using it as plugin to view PDFs online.

I know there are many alternatives for the products put out by the big name companies. But again, I don't want to spend hours tracking down this software, and then dealing with any installation problems. That's why I use NetBSD. Between its solid core, excellent development team and pkgsrc, I can get easy and fast access to all of the software I need. And I don't need to install performance-degrading anti-virus software, nor do I worry about malware infections. Best of all, it just plain works.

What do I get by installing this that I can't get in a 2 year-old Gentoo Linux installation? The BSD's have always been a bit of an enigma to me. Could someone enlighten me?

firs of all, nobody is trying to make you switch. the BSDs aren't out to conquer the world (AFAIK), they just try to make proper operating systems.

second, you get:

• totally sweet firewalling, with ipf and pf
• proper package management with pkgsrc (your beloved portage? that's where it gets its roots)
• the ability to run the same configuration on dozens of different archs (that might not sound like much, if you only run i386, but there's people with lots of different gear out there)
• a clean, small, stable base system which includes everything you need to get your server going in a few minutes (literally, NetBSD installs in 2 minutes, even on old hardware) -- you can build on top of that, with pkgsrc or prebuilt binary packages
• run your favorite proprietary applications through the emulation layer (compat Linux, compat WIN32, etc)

and many more. you can read in detail on the project's feature page. that being said:

10:49:47 (1.15 MB/s) - `i386cd-3.0.2.iso' saved [209747968]

...it shows up in pkgsrc? I might actually get a chance to check it out this year. (boy am I glad I don't use debian any more!)

The pkgsrc project www.pkgsrc.org supports Mac OS X. The packages it contains are much more up to date than either Fink or DarwinPorts, and can also be used on a number of other Unix like operating systems. I bought a Mac at the beginning of the year, and intended to wipe the disk to install NetBSD. I ended up dual booting it because I found I liked Mac OS X so much, especially when I can use pkgsrc on it.

Gentoo on OS X? Yuck. Please just use pkgsrc for a source-based package management system that is actually maintained by SANE developers.

He was talking about NetBSD's pkgsrc packaging system, similar to portage and FreeBSD's ports.

You can use pkgsrc from NetBSD on a linux kernel.

pkgsrc supports several versions of OpenBSD and Solaris, in addition to numerous other systems. It does offer pre-compiled binaries for such systems.

By 'support' I meant that VMWare, Inc does not make a native binary which you can run on FreeBSD. They make binaries for Linux, and for Windows...if you run anything else, you either do without, or you use pkgsrc or FreeBSD ports (which uses a series of fairly crude hacks to get the Linux binary of an old version of VMWare to run on *BSD).

Maybe pkgsrc would be the solution?
Take a look at http://pkgsrc.org/

NetBSD's binary releases include support for an amazing 40 platforms and an additional 12 platforms in the source code.

No, 54 platforms with 48 as binary release.

It's currently at version 2.6.1, with aggressive testing on the new NetBSD 2.0 promising fruition by the first half of 2005.

No, it's currently at version 3.99.7 and NetBSD 2.0 was released in December 2004.

Its desktop and production applications are so limited as to be nonexistent and this isn't likely to change even after NetBSD 2.0 is released.

I wouldn't call 5400 ports in pkgsrc, which is, btw, available for 12 different OSes, "nonexistent". If the only thing you can do is to paste some old article in here, go away.

Microsoft bought Interix years ago. It's now available in the form of Microsoft Windows Services For Unix (SFU) currently version 3.5.

It is decent - I'd probably give it 3 stars (out of a possible 5). What makes it decent (in my opinion) is the porting of NetBSD's pkgsrc (http://pkgsrc.org/ to the Interix toolchain.

This means you can compile your own shit (OpenSSH, bash, etc.) from the pkgsrc collection. For those of you who are unfamiliar with pkgsrc, think Gentoo's portage.

This is where it gets really interesting. Daniel Robbins (of Gentoo fame) as we all know - now an employee of MS. Microsoft could do something really cool here if they "shared sourced" SFU as a standalone kernel and OS. They have everything in place to do it. Even if they don't open it up, at least their users might get a reliable, kick-ass OS for once.

Just a thought. I think it's (only slightly) more likely than what TFA's author imagines.

Gentoo(Linux, not BSD):
19384 ebuilds, 9440 Packages, Last Updated At 12:21:45 GMT

PkgSrc (NetBSD+):
Over 5400 packages

FreeBSD Freshports:
10897

I was unable to find stats for OpenBSD, but I last recall it was in the 2000 range.

Anywho, my point being, it contains about 1/2 of the packages that Gentoo has (and, let's be honest, a lot of the stuff in Gentoo is fluffy crap) and runs on platforms that it is dead-impossible to find decent apps for, like AIX.

PkgSrc alone is worth a small donation. With it, you can compile the same apps for many different operating systems, including Solaris, *BSD, Linux, and Irix. While not as extensive as some of the Port systems, the fact that it is so standardized across the board is a decent exchange.

Again, the BIG development for OpenBSD 3.8 would be a rework of the ports/package system. It will include the pkgsrc to avoid downtime due to the following recomendations:

"Before upgrading, some users choose to remove all packages, and installing new versions after upgrade. If your platform is one of those that switched to gcc3 (macppc, i386), you SHOULD probably do this.

To quickly remove all packages from your system:

pkg_delete -q /var/db/pkg/*

After the upgrade, install the new versions of these applications."

Can you imagine doing this every time you upgrade to a new version? Do that on your desktop OS every 6 months and you will understand how painful this is.

References:
http://www.pkgsrc.org/
http://openbsd.org/faq/upgrade37.html

Rather than "Starter Edition," here's some suggestions, if anyone from Redmond just happens to read this. (I know they won't do it - it's more a mental exercise while I eat)

1. Go download this, and make it natively multi-user if it isn't already. Give it a strong native security model, too...you can get some ideas here, and the best part is, they won't mind you doing that if you don't try and patent said ideas. Also, modularise your GUI, and don't prevent users from accessing the CLI when they want to.

2. Have the CLI composed of this and this for us CLI types.

3. Make the Add/Remove Programs panel essentially a net-aware frontend for either this or this.

4. Use this for hardware detection. Also re drivers, get rid of the suicidal policy of seeing third-party hardware vendors as the enemy, and actually support them...via tools, docs, etc. These people are your friends...they'll help you stay relevant.

5. Download this and use it as your default FS, and then get this and this, (although you already seem to know about this last one) and incorporate both of those into your stock UI. You've essentially got WinFS right there, without all the added complexity you'd no doubt throw into it if you tried to code it from scratch.

6. For the Agent angle, incorporate the last point, as well as putting help/docs in a non-binary format, making them searchable with this, converting said search results for use with this, and then use the AIML output as input for something like this. Also, instead of making the agent a tightly anthropomorphic personality, make it more generic, and more as though it's simply "the operating system" communicating with a user, rather than that dog or Clippit instead.

7. Give Outlook a major overhaul. This and this are examples of directions it IMHO should go in.

Just some random ideas, anywayz. Dreaming's fun. ;) I'll probably get modded Offtopic, but it was worth it.

pkgsrc is released separately from NetBSD, and it has a good QA done on its 5300 packages.

See pkgsrc.org.

But once you've installed MacOS X, be sure to put Gentoo Portage on it to make it usable!

For a BSD solution, try pkgsrc.

I'm quite happily running NetBSD's pkgsrc on Solaris. pkgsrc supports a number of commercial Unix flavours although I believe Solaris was the first to be added. Hell, you can even use it on a Linux distribution. FWIU the Gentoo effort will be along similar lines although this is yet to be seen.

pkgsrc us a source-based packaging system that works on MacOS X, Linux and many other operating systems (even Windows, with SFU).

More information:

http://www.pkgsrc.org/
http://www.feyrer.de/Texts/Own/21c3-pkgsrc-slides. pdf

I might have missed something here but I really don't understand all the fuzz about Linux nowadays. I thought I did back in the days when I had no first hand experience about any Unix variants. After I got familiar with GNU/Linux I realized how messy it was, having to be all the time ready to build a new kernel and reboot. Repeat for every single machine. Shame on the admin that dared to go for a vacation. Anyone who has heard about Murphy must realize those are the most likely days for a brand new vulnerability to be released.

As I sought for alternative I heard that BSDs can do the same things as GNU/Linuxes but without all the hassle. Since no media had ever mentioned a word about them, I though they were only for 24 / 7 hackers and not have the least bit of user-friendliness. But as soon as I heard that FreeBSD is easier to install than Gentoo I gave it a try.

Now, a year later, security hasn't been a reason for even a single boot for the server I set up. This is the first BSD server I've installed and I succeeded in first try. Meanwhile I hear all the time my fellow Linux admins having to suppress their normal use while compiling a new kernel and swearing a lot when having to do this at short notice, which does happen many times a year. Quite a lot of them have now switched to some BSD or are looking forward to switching.

For what I've heard from NetBSD admins, it's quite about the same as FreeBSD but without a menu-based installer and a better alternative for ports, pkgsrc. Luckily pkgsrc is a multi-platform software, being available as source but also as pre-built binaries for many BSD and GNU/Linux distros, including FreeBSD, Debian, OpenBSD, Slackware, Solaris, Darwin and so on.

Since I've found ports being sometimes a bit clumsy and I don't like its principle of "all software being updated as soon as possible" as much as pkgsrc's "software being updated after testing giving updates for many programs at a time", my next Unix variant of choice could be NetBSD or FreeBSD with pkgsrc installed instead of ports.

The big question is, what better do GNU/Linuxes really offer than BSDs? And which of these things could have already been achieved with a larger user and developer base, ie. if all the hype wasn't just about Linux?

FreeBSD's root shell is /bin/csh (which is in fact tcsh), and it's quite usable.

Your other points simply show your lack of experience with Solaris. Yes, it's different from Linux, so what. Yes, the first thing a good Solaris admin does is lock down the box and remove unnecessary services.

Most desktop installs of Solaris are usually integrated into a NIS/YP network, with NFS mounts for user accounts. All those defaults that seemed weird to you are there because that's how most people in large Solaris shops do things.

bash, gcc and other pieces of OSS are in the companion CDs, but they get old pretty soon, so I'd suggest using NetBSD's pkgsrc system, which works beautifully on Solaris.

Give a BSD a try some day (OpenBSD is a good start) and see how others do their stuff. What you experienced is comparable to and old BSD fart trying a Linux distro for the first time, everything is in the wrong place! :)

This might have changed, but at least in Solaris 8, the first CD booted into a graphical and slow install, while booting off the second one used a curses install, much faster and convenient.

He has a very interesting perspective on pksrc, which I _really_ love.

for those who don't know

He probably is what would be portrayed as a hackers-everyman.
I mean, yes, he does have a lot of CompSci and coding experience, but he does some of the necessary things that most people (relatively of course) can do, such as documentation, mirroring, and helping out with packages.

There's more to a project than just coders ;)

http://www.pkgsrc.org/ is what you are looking for. Bootstrapping requires some manual work, but after that most packages will build just fine. Here is a howto that should make setup easier.

Hmm, sounds like pkgsrc.

NetBSD team is obsessed with portability, and that's a very good thing. Each part of the OS tends to be most portable and clean. Basically, NetBSD package collection, which I personally use on FreeBSD and Linux is much cleaner, than FreeBSD Ports or Gentoo Portage (and it is portable, you should see that already). NetBSD is missing, for example, tcsh in the base install, which sometimes will make people say it's obscure, but well. Even if you don't use NetBSD and you do use FreeBSD or OpenBSD, chances are that you're still using large parts of work done by NetBSD team (you do use rc.d scripts in your FreeBSD 5.x, do you? what about USB devices? :). Having a closer look at NetBSD is definetley a good lesson, even if that's not going to be your "number one" OS.

Pkgsrc is available for many OSes. It's most matured on BSD/Linux. It would be cool if several of the BSD's and Linux would use it. Check it out www.pkgsrc.org

NetBSD
OpenBSD
FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Irix
Darwin (OS X)

Gnustepweb is a framework that is supposedly compatible with WebObjects.

The parent post has a really, really good point. GNUStep has oh, so much potential and it's getting close to ready.

Like it or lump it, Apple has produced the most cohesive *nix environment out there. They've got support from the important corporate software vendors. Vendors want to port to Linux, but damn, the myriad gui toolkits and serious lack of complete frameworks is daunting for commercial entities.

I know choice is good, but is Cocoa/Aqua that unexpressive to code in? The proliferation of apps for the Mac would seem to point to the contrary. Why must we reinvent the boring stuff (i.e. toolkits and frameworks) over and over? Couldn't we just adopt a proven successful model, run with it, then tweak where needed?

I just built GNUStep from NetBSD's excellent cross-platform package management/build system, pkgsrc. GNUStep is pretty cool. It's like a slightly primative, somewhat ugly Mac. Other than that, it's very, very similar. It's clear people are starting to write useful apps with it. It's got a finder-like app called GWorkspace. It's got a pretty decent mail application that runs on both MacOS and GNUStep.

-Peter

I exactly known, what you mean about the ports system. FYI, you don't mean "the port system itself", you just have problems with installation of binary packages.

Of course, you can pkg_add http://URL, and it will automatically fetch dependent packages, but the problem is, you need to know the exact url. Package name, package version, .tgz or .tbz - that's a bit confusing. You're right. It can be done better, just like the way Debian does that. Debian simply rocks when it comes to binary packages - and I am pretty happy, that it exists, so it showed the way in this area.

I suppose I will be doing some work in this area with NetBSD packages collection (pkgsrc), but that should be easily portable to FreeBSD and OpenBSD ports. The whole idea is, that if you generate an index file for all binary packages on the site. Information would include the description, requirements, size - pretty much everything found in +* files (+DESCR, +COMMENT, +PLIST and other) - perhaps I could use Berkeley DB format for it. Then, in an user-level utility, you just need to give one URL to fetch that description file (bzipped, of course). Then, such utility could work much like Debian's apt-get and apt-cache - a frontend to pkg_add and a quick way to browse all available, but uninstalled software. We'd have a friendly utility for new users for all BSDs.

Also, as pkgsrc is portable and there are already binary packages avialable for Linux (not to mention NetBSD, of course) from the latest branch of pkgsrc -- we'd just need to add that small utility to bootstrap binary kit for pkgsrc, and you'd have then binary pkgsrc available for your box -- pretty much for all Linux distributions. These are all cool projects, and they can give you perhaps much more, than some Linux distributions (especially those ones, who "lock" user in a maze of incompatible binary packages and their dependencies ;). In fact, it can even be the basic package system on your Slack (and it is available from some time, so you don't have to create another Slackware-packaging-system). Oh, wel.

And, perhaps, if FreeBSD Ports not impress you, when compared to Gentoo, perhaps you should try then NetBSD packages collection. Maybe the number of operating systems and platforms will somehow impress you, it impress me for sure. Of course, there are bigger and smaller problems, as they always are, in any opensource product, but perhaps with more users activley contributing to the project (just by testing the packages -- that's just using some of your CPU cycles on pkgsrc, instead SETI@Home ;)

BSD? Dead? I don't think so. There's massive active development going on in all areas of each of the BSDs, there are thousands of lines of code shared among developers, lot of new ideas submited, lots of problems solved. There are a lot of companies and sites using it (among others, About.com, Yahoo!, distributed.net, Juniper, NASA)... Check uptime stats on Netcraft itself, FreeBSD rules in the top ten.

Its just perhaps BSD people are usually too busy doing their projects to comment here, so you can get a false impression ;) Or, perhaps, noone likes to answer troll comments - but you've got a point with that packaging system, so that's why I bothered ;)

Have a nice day!

I exactly known, what you mean about the ports system. FYI, you don't mean "the port system itself", you just have problems with installation of binary packages.

Of course, you can pkg_add http://URL, and it will automatically fetch dependent packages, but the problem is, you need to know the exact url. Package name, package version, .tgz or .tbz - that's a bit confusing. You're right. It can be done better, just like the way Debian does that. Debian simply rocks when it comes to binary packages - and I am pretty happy, that it exists, so it showed the way in this area.

I suppose I will be doing some work in this area with NetBSD packages collection (pkgsrc), but that should be easily portable to FreeBSD and OpenBSD ports. The whole idea is, that if you generate an index file for all binary packages on the site. Information would include the description, requirements, size - pretty much everything found in +* files (+DESCR, +COMMENT, +PLIST and other) - perhaps I could use Berkeley DB format for it. Then, in an user-level utility, you just need to give one URL to fetch that description file (bzipped, of course). Then, such utility could work much like Debian's apt-get and apt-cache - a frontend to pkg_add and a quick way to browse all available, but uninstalled software. We'd have a friendly utility for new users for all BSDs.

Also, as pkgsrc is portable and there are already binary packages avialable for Linux (not to mention NetBSD, of course) from the latest branch of pkgsrc -- we'd just need to add that small utility to bootstrap binary kit for pkgsrc, and you'd have then binary pkgsrc available for your box -- pretty much for all Linux distributions. These are all cool projects, and they can give you perhaps much more, than some Linux distributions (especially those ones, who "lock" user in a maze of incompatible binary packages and their dependencies ;). In fact, it can even be the basic package system on your Slack (and it is available from some time, so you don't have to create another Slackware-packaging-system). Oh, wel.

And, perhaps, if FreeBSD Ports not impress you, when compared to Gentoo, perhaps you should try then NetBSD packages collection. Maybe the number of operating systems and platforms will somehow impress you, it impress me for sure. Of course, there are bigger and smaller problems, as they always are, in any opensource product, but perhaps with more users activley contributing to the project (just by testing the packages -- that's just using some of your CPU cycles on pkgsrc, instead SETI@Home ;)

BSD? Dead? I don't think so. There's massive active development going on in all areas of each of the BSDs, there are thousands of lines of code shared among developers, lot of new ideas submited, lots of problems solved. There are a lot of companies and sites using it (among others, About.com, Yahoo!, distributed.net, Juniper, NASA)... Check uptime stats on Netcraft itself, FreeBSD rules in the top ten.

Its just perhaps BSD people are usually too busy doing their projects to comment here, so you can get a false impression ;) Or, perhaps, noone likes to answer troll comments - but you've got a point with that packaging system, so that's why I bothered ;)

Have a nice day!

I exactly known, what you mean about the ports system. FYI, you don't mean "the port system itself", you just have problems with installation of binary packages.

Of course, you can pkg_add http://URL, and it will automatically fetch dependent packages, but the problem is, you need to know the exact url. Package name, package version, .tgz or .tbz - that's a bit confusing. You're right. It can be done better, just like the way Debian does that. Debian simply rocks when it comes to binary packages - and I am pretty happy, that it exists, so it showed the way in this area.

I suppose I will be doing some work in this area with NetBSD packages collection (pkgsrc), but that should be easily portable to FreeBSD and OpenBSD ports. The whole idea is, that if you generate an index file for all binary packages on the site. Information would include the description, requirements, size - pretty much everything found in +* files (+DESCR, +COMMENT, +PLIST and other) - perhaps I could use Berkeley DB format for it. Then, in an user-level utility, you just need to give one URL to fetch that description file (bzipped, of course). Then, such utility could work much like Debian's apt-get and apt-cache - a frontend to pkg_add and a quick way to browse all available, but uninstalled software. We'd have a friendly utility for new users for all BSDs.

Also, as pkgsrc is portable and there are already binary packages avialable for Linux (not to mention NetBSD, of course) from the latest branch of pkgsrc -- we'd just need to add that small utility to bootstrap binary kit for pkgsrc, and you'd have then binary pkgsrc available for your box -- pretty much for all Linux distributions. These are all cool projects, and they can give you perhaps much more, than some Linux distributions (especially those ones, who "lock" user in a maze of incompatible binary packages and their dependencies ;). In fact, it can even be the basic package system on your Slack (and it is available from some time, so you don't have to create another Slackware-packaging-system). Oh, wel.

And, perhaps, if FreeBSD Ports not impress you, when compared to Gentoo, perhaps you should try then NetBSD packages collection. Maybe the number of operating systems and platforms will somehow impress you, it impress me for sure. Of course, there are bigger and smaller problems, as they always are, in any opensource product, but perhaps with more users activley contributing to the project (just by testing the packages -- that's just using some of your CPU cycles on pkgsrc, instead SETI@Home ;)

BSD? Dead? I don't think so. There's massive active development going on in all areas of each of the BSDs, there are thousands of lines of code shared among developers, lot of new ideas submited, lots of problems solved. There are a lot of companies and sites using it (among others, About.com, Yahoo!, distributed.net, Juniper, NASA)... Check uptime stats on Netcraft itself, FreeBSD rules in the top ten.

Its just perhaps BSD people are usually too busy doing their projects to comment here, so you can get a false impression ;) Or, perhaps, noone likes to answer troll comments - but you've got a point with that packaging system, so that's why I bothered ;)

Have a nice day!

The only drawback is that it doesn't integrate with the Solaris-native package management scheme, it uses its own database and utilities. It is also not a good idea to use it with the Sunfreeware GCC, one should use the pkgsrc version (after bootstrapping it with the one from sunfreeware)..

Would it be possible to use pkgsrc as the main package management system on a Linux box, say, Slackware? What I mean is, forget Slackware's package management system altogether and replace it with NetBSD's pkgsrc.

NetBSD also runs on machines like Dreamcast or Playstation -- and I doubt anyone at a serious enterprise would consider running his/hers business using game consoles. Why does NetBSD community does that? Because it is fun, because people do have unused hardware, which becomes great when it has unix installed, because they _can_.

Porting software to NetBSD's pkgsrc collection brings also a great deal of _learning_ - if you introduce patches, you cannot think just about one platform, you have to think about 52 platforms - your patches must be portable and they cannot break builds on other operating systems.

I recommend NetBSD. Give it a try, not to mention it is very stable operating system, it has a great Linux emulation layer, which runs - among others - latest VMware, Intel C Compiler or Kylix.

Here's a
list of 3rd Party Software that can be installed on OpenBSD via pkgsrc.

- Hubert

Or we could go the other way. Pkgsrc is what NetBSD uses and it is available on several platforms. It is platform independant and you can check out Work In Progress before it makes it into the main tree. They have BSD, Linux, Irix, Solaris and OS X (Darwin) so far. I've been playing with it on OS X and Irix lately and it's nice to have some consistency across platforms.

Of course everyone has their own opinion but I'll stick with ports/pkgsrc for me. Perhaps there will be something I like more later but not right now.