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FreeBSD XP^H^H 4.5 available now

Posted by Nik on from the this-time,-with-feeling dept.

The_Rift was one of many who wrote in with this news: "The official mail has gone out to the FreeBSD-announce mailing list announcing the availability of Freebsd 4.5. Check your local mirrors for the ISOs.". The release notes have all the details, but take it from me -- this one is worth it just for the TCP/IP performance improvements by Matt Dillon and others. Kudos to Murray, Bruce, and the rest of the release engineering team.

1 of 362 comments (clear)

  1. FreeBSD Ports by Fweeky · · Score: 4, Interesting

    > Contrary to popular belief, the ports system is
    > a steaming pile of horse crap. It offers little
    > or no flexibility in regards to how packages
    > are built,

    Most ports include all the options you need as make defines. If you need more, you can copy the makefile and edit it to your hearts content, and maybe type "send-pr" and submit a patch. Or you can just compile from bog standard source and have the rest of the ports tree use it because they look for libs, binaries and executables, not packages.

    > and has a nasty habit of installing
    > unecassary dependencies.

    Such as? It's certainly nowhere near as bad as Debian, where the entire packages system is so complex and interdependent that it needs to go through years of testing before a release is concidered stable.

    > For an example, try compiling PostgreSQL on a
    > non-XFree FreeBSD machine from the ports tree.
    > Notice how it insists on installing XFree86.

    It used to want TK, which would want the XFree libs. That's no longer the case.

    > You can't pass it any configure script options > like --without-xfree or ---don't build-
    > retarded-gui.

    For most people flags like -DWITHOUT_X11 etc are good enough. Otherwise scratch your itch and send-pr.

    > Even with RPMs I can do that. In the end, you
    > usually just wind up downloading the tarball
    > and compiling it yourself, which seems to
    > defeat the purpouse of a Ports/ Package
    > Managment system entierly.

    Making your own ports is trivial, pr's usually get resolved in a couple of days, and installing from source interacts with the ports system far better than any RPM/DEB system I've seen.

    Frankly it sounds like you haven't tried it in a while. Sure, it's nowhere near perfect, but what is? Certainly not a binary package system with fragile dep issues and completely unaudited sources.