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FreeBSD Ports Collection Reaches 7000

Posted by timothy on from the and-growing dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "The FreeBSD ports collection has just had the 7000th port committed. The original message can be read in Kris Kennaway's post to freebsd-ports."

10 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. Giving Debian a run for its money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative
    Debian is currently around 9,500 and has the most ports of any Linux distribution.

    FreeBSD is catching up fast. Hopefully soon we'll have two spectacularly complete UNIX distributions to choose from!

    1. Re:Giving Debian a run for its money by __past__ · · Score: 2, Funny
      Debian is currently around 9,500 and has the most ports of any Linux distribution.
      Yeah, but we all know how they managed that...
      --
      Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
    2. Re:Giving Debian a run for its money by Clue4All · · Score: 3, Insightful

      True, but that number is over-inflated. Debian counts ports for different parts of the same package, such as openssl, libopenssl, and libopenssl-devel for OpenSSL. These are all one OpenSSL port in FreeBSD, as it is with any library. I'd be surprised if Debian had a number close to equal to FreeBSD's ports if they were counted the same way.

      --

      Is your browser retarded?
    3. Re:Giving Debian a run for its money by Arandir · · Score: 2

      I noticed that too about Debian. The "atomicity" of the packages under Debian is far lower than that under FreeBSD. One port in FreeBSD might equate to up to four packages on Debian.

      It's silly to claim that one or the other has the most packages. I'll still root for FreeBSD though...

      --
      A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
  2. Just in time by __past__ · · Score: 3, Interesting
    ... given there is a freeze for the ports tree scheduled friday, due to the upcoming 4.6 release.

    Imagine how many it could be if it wouldn't take so darn long until ports made by non-commiters make it in CVS. There are a lot of open "New Port:" pr's in GNATS, and I strongly doubt that they are all problematic in any way, problably nobody found the time to look at them in most cases. This is quite annoying, if you created a port and it sits there uncommited for months.

    However, congrats to all porters! Keep on the good work.

    --
    Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
    1. Re:Just in time by Arandir · · Score: 2

      Do what I do: "Dear Mr. Committer, I noticed that my port has been languishing in GNATS for a month now. Is there a problem with this port? Is it failing to build? Is it breaking hier(7)? Please let me know so I can fix it."

      I get the response: "Nothing's wrong with it, we're just backlogged. Here, I'll commit it right now... Thanks for your patience."

      (of course, right before the 4.6 freeze, they REALLY are backlogged)

      --
      A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
  3. Is there a collection of sources packages by Krapangor · · Score: 2, Interesting
    usable with the ports system out there ?
    If you are at a slow internet connection you cannot afford to download all the sources.
    I think this is the main flaw of the ports system and the reason why *BSD is not used of stand alone desktops very often.
    Yes, I know that there are binary packages out there now.

    BTW: a search in the posts package for "bsd is dying" returns "Sorry, nothing found. You may look for other FreeBSD Search Services."
    It seems that there is still much to do for them.

    --
    Owner of a Mensa membership card.
    1. Re:Is there a collection of sources packages by biglig2 · · Score: 2

      He doesn't say he is a member of Mensa, just that he owns a membership card. ;-)

      Ina similar way, just because CowboyNeal owns a star trek uniform, doesn't mean he is a member of StarFleet... or is he?

      --
      ~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
  4. Re:7000 ports == lots of unportable software by Bishop · · Score: 2

    I suspect you are trolling. but...

    Two many people know how to write code, but don't know how to develope code. A symptom of this problem is that you get code that was written on a Linux platform, but was not written or designed for a Unix platform. So yes there is lots of unportable code.

    The need for a ports system would exist regardless of the "quality of free software." Perfectly portable code will always require some patching to configure the software for the target OS. Even if all the patch does is move the location of the documents from /usr/share/doc to /usr/doc. Until every distro, and every Unix-like OS is identical this will be the case.

  5. gak! minor correction by Bishop · · Score: 2

    damn, even after a preview:

    s/Two/Too/