Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

FreeBSD Passes 9000 Ports

Posted by Hemos on from the great-work dept.

Dan writes "Kris Kennaway believes that the french/med port has the honour of being the 9000'th in the FreeBSD ports collection. Congratulations to everyone who has helped to make the Ports Collection such a success over the past 9 years!"

12 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Cannot parse. by acidtripp101 · · Score: 2, Informative

    No, what he's saying is that when freeBSD started (Man... I don't even know how long ago), there was less software to put into the port tree, so hitting that "5000+" mark in a year was nearly impossible.

    --
    Not Free(as in beer). Free(as in "I'm free to beat you over the head for being a dumbass")
  2. Just another reason to love FreeBSD by blate · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've been a FreeBSD fan for several years now. Had I been smarter when I was younger, I would have been a fan even longer than that :)

    FreeBSD, IMHO, comes pretty darned close to Linux in terms of ease of install and, in many ways, exceeds it in ease of use. Configuration files are where you expect them to be. Utilities are named what you expect them to be named.

    And, to tie into this article, the ports collection provides a wealth of great software. There's no issue as to which flavor of Linux you have... if you're running FreeBSD, the port will generally work on your system, whether you compile it from sources or download the precompiled package from one of the ftp mirrors.

    Kudos to the FreeBSD team for all their hard work and for giving us such a stable, reliable, useful platform to develop and play on.

    1. Re:Just another reason to love FreeBSD by blate · · Score: 4, Informative

      You make a good point... apt and rpm do a nice job, perhaps as good or possibly better than ports.

      One place where ports has an advantage, however, IMHO, is that the "database" of available packages lives on your local filesystem... you don't have to go searching around the web for the package you want, and you don't need a GUI to fetch and install packages.

      Yes, I know, rpm and apt have command-line modes, but I'm not aware of a way to "browse" collections of these types of packages without a GUI. I'm usually more at home in a console window than a clunky, slow X app.

      I guess we're at the point of arguing matters of taste, which is usually fruitless. FreeBSD is a wonderful OS, as is Linux, but it doesn't get as much press. The ports collection is something the FreeBSD team can and should be proud of.

    2. Re:Just another reason to love FreeBSD by arturogatti · · Score: 5, Informative

      "One place where ports has an advantage, however, IMHO, is that the "database" of available packages lives on your local filesystem... you don't have to go searching around the web for the package you want, and you don't need a GUI to fetch and install packages."

      With apt (assuming you've run "apt-get update" at least once since the system was installed, and thus have package lists to search) you don't need to go online to search the package database. You can use the "apt-cache search" command for this. Just type, for example, "apt-cache search alsa" to produce a list of all packages containing the word "alsa" in their names or descriptions.

    3. Re:Just another reason to love FreeBSD by Nothinman · · Score: 3, Informative

      There are several console apt front ends that let you browse, search, etc available packages. dselect, aptitude, synaptic, etc.

    4. Re:Just another reason to love FreeBSD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      cd /usr/ports
      make search key="search_terms"

  3. Re:almost 3 per day by satanami69 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not to take away their thunder, but p5-Unicode-Lite 0.12 counts as a port, so an entire program may have 15 sub-ports. Still, I like it better than Gentoo.

    --
    I really hate Dan Patrick.
  4. Re:almost 3 per day by m0rten · · Score: 5, Informative
    Maybe FreeBSD should add a single file, like /etc/with.conf, where all of those WITH_FOO=yes knobs are listed and which is sourced before each port is build. So portupgrade would respect those, too


    You do know that portupgrade reads the /usr/local/etc/pkgtools.conf file when upgrading, reinstalling, etc ports? This is a excellent place to put your WITH_* knobs. There's even a few examples in the file to get you going..

    Also, I believe they can be put in /etc/make.conf, but then they will be global and will be used for all ports!
  5. Re:almost 3 per day by junics · · Score: 3, Informative

    And accelerating :)
    (Gnu)plot of growth

  6. Re:Problems porting by rainer_d · · Score: 4, Informative
    Having gone to FreeBSD.org and looked at the ports, it looks like they've updated them finally so that I'll be able to get the Linux-HA FreeBSD Port completed.

    You can also go to Freshports where you can get a nice view of the cvs-commits to the ports-tree.
    Have you tried contacting the maintainer for the relevant autoconf/automake port with your problems in the past ?

    cheers,
    Rainer

    --
    Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
  7. Re:big trouble with ports by beefdart · · Score: 2, Informative

    hrmmm... > man cvsup ?? Maybe thats just too complicated...

  8. Re:wow 9000 ports! by DeltaSigma · · Score: 2, Informative

    Ports for the TCP/IP protocol. When programs talk to each other, they do so for ports. So when your browser communicates with a web server they go between your address and the server address on port 80 (usually). This is how you prevent network programs from being run on your network. Say you wish to stop kazaa, you close off the ports kazaa can use to communicate. Thus kazaa can't request information from kazaa servers, and servers can't establish a connection to the kazaa client to send it information.