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Open Packages For *BSD

Posted by timothy on from the points-of-convergence dept.

ctg1701 noticed that daemonews was running "a story today about openpackages for *BSD," and says "I am a big fan of the freebsd and openbsd operating systems and having a seamless way of creating packages on these and other platforms would be great. It seems they are also working on porting this over to HPUX and Mac OSX. Very cool stuff. Check it out at http://www.openpackages.org."

2 of 7 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Great news by edhall · · Score: 4

    What you ask for already exists. They're called "ports," and there is also talk of unified ports. (OK, well here are a few ports that are partly or wholy binaries, but for the most part the port mechanism is for fetching and building sources; you can take days perusing the source between a "make" and a "make install" if you like.)

    I've built many a program from plain tarballs and even separately fetched source files. I see no reason for people to get "used" to such things again when there are mechanisms that make it much less likely to compromise security by misunderstanding a configuration option or to waste lots of time puzzling over include file dependencies and so on.

    I think that in most cases, source browsing is among the least efficient uses of time in securing a system. If you assume from the start that the software will have bugs, and configure and compartmentalize it accordingly, you'll be miles ahead. Tens of thousands of people built sendmail and bind from source tarballs but serious security bugs still lurked unfound in both for years. What makes you think you'd be so much better at finding them? I know I'm not. That's why I employ wrappers, packet filters, chroot() and jail(), router ACLs, physical access controls, and so forth and so on.

    In any case, pre-built tools aren't the answer for security, either; they're just another option, with its own tradeoffs. In the struggle to make the best use of my time, they can be most welcome.

    -Ed
  2. Porting to MacOS X? by zzen · · Score: 3
    Claiming porting projects are under way for HP UX is OK, but with MacOS X, this is inaccurate.

    MacOS X has been a target from the very beginning, as have been all other BSDs (NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Darwin). On top of it, Apple one of the sponsors of this project and has some of it's engineers working on it. The official policy is "anybody is welcome to do a port to any other platform".

    Oh - and openpackages contain source, not binary. The project aims to produce standardized "make(1) and pkg_*(1) tools". It occured to me some previous posters understood it the other way...

    http://www.openpackages.org/