FreeBSD Ports Tricks

BSD Forums writes "One of FreeBSD's biggest benefits is its ports collection. You can go years without learning more than just make install clean, but there are dozens of features built into the ports tools. OnLamp's Dru Lavigne demonstrates several of these tricks to simplify your life."

Comments

Kudos to the author!

[dodell]

The complaint of many people who don't want to switch to BSD from Linux is that there aren't binary packages available and that they don't want to compile everything in ports. This article demonstrates that, indeed, using the ports collection, it is possible to check out and install binary packages using the pkg-* utilities.

There are tons of really neat things about FreeBSD; I won't list them here because they're probably quite off topic. But for anybody interested in learning more; feel free to contact me and/or check out the FreeBSD handbook and the FreeBSD diary.

Re:Kudos to the author!

[Anonymous Coward]

The complaint of many people who don't want to switch to BSD from Linux is that there aren't binary packages available and that they don't want to compile everything in ports. This article demonstrates that, indeed, using the ports collection, it is possible to check out and install binary packages using the pkg-* utilities.

While this is wonderful news, does this mean us mere Linux users should want to switch to *BSD now?

Envy

[__aavhli5779]

Reading the article just makes me yearn for a true BSD ports system on OS X.

The closest thing available right now is DarwinPorts but it's horrendously incomplete; I don't think any good package system can get away with lacking any way to track installed packages or perform upgrades; not only is there no facility for system-wide upgrades, but even upgrading an individual package requires an explicit uninstall, download, and reinstall.

I know that the Gentoo, Fink, and OpenDarwin folks are supposed to be collaborating on a unified package system for OS X. Does anyone in the know have any inklings that it might be like BSD ports? A BSD ports system does seem ideal for an OS that is, at the core, BSD.

Re:Envy

[^Case^]

Does anyone in the know have any inklings that it might be like BSD ports?

I'm no BSD ports expert, but from what I hear the Gentoo team is porting their Portage system, which is heavily inspired by the BSD ports system, to other platforms (OS X).

Portage does support the things you mention, system-wide upgrades and tracking installed packages.

Checkout the Gentoo website for more information.

Re:yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Guys, what happens if I remove a piece of software after it's been installed and lots of other software depends on it. Will "Ports" warn me about what will break, or will it just go ahead and do it, and leave me scratching my head trying to figure out what happened?

Seems to cut to the heart of a real package system, IMO.

Re:My beef with FreeBSDs port system..

[junics]

It is possabile to download older makefiles (and whatever is required) of a port via the cvsweb interface on freebsd.org.
It's not fun downloading individual files but it has saved my day on several occations.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/

Feeling of unease

[Matey-O]

I've got a NetBSD box running as my external (wild, hairy, unsafe) webserver.

I'd spent quite a bit of time learning Redhat 8, relearned Redhat 9, and again started over with NetBSD. (looking at mandrake, gentoo, and a raft of others as well)

Why is is that these OS's are alike in name only? The package management is entirely different, the disk partitioning is entirely different, heck FINDING files is different ( find * | grep foo vs. find | grep foo)

Enough is slightly different to make it feel like you're learning over from scratch (adduser v. useradd), and enough is COMPLETELY different to prove the point.

One thing I've determined: If I get an applicant who says they know 'Unix' without specifying the flavor will get roundfiled.

Re:Feeling of unease

[Hatta]

Dunno, when I tried FreeBSD it was similar enough for me not to worry about it most of the time. I finally switched back to debian because I couldn't get acpi to function properly. But I don't see what the big deal is. There are a few differences, sure but BSD and GNU/Linux are not the same OS. What differences there are you can easily pick up on the fly.
But why use grep with find? Why not just 'find . -name foo' This has the benefit that you can match on characteristics other than file name too. Like 'find . -name foo -ctime 1' to find files named foo that have changed in the past 24 hours. Or 'find . -name "fo*" -type d' to find directories that begin with the letters 'fo'. You can even use the exec flag to run a command on each file. Find has become so much more useful since I stopped using it with grep.

Re:Useful

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a good article. It is quite dated though. They're using FreeBSD 4.2 and Linux 2.2.16! I wouldn't be surprised to see FreeBSD still doing worse than Linux, but not that much worse on such low end configuration.

Re:Yes, FreeBSD does run Linux.

[TheRaven64]

One thing it doesn't do, however, is set up the Linux procfs. /proc on a Linux box has a different structure to that on a FreeBSD box, and a lot of the problems with running Linux software on FreeBSD come from this. Fortunately, FreeBSD can mount a Linux style procfs. The bad news is that this is not mounted by default. This prevents some Linux programs (such as the Half Life dedicated server) from running. To fix this you need to add the following line to your /etc/fstab

linproc /compat/linux/proc linprocfs rw 0 0

Re:Gentoo!!

[RdsArts]

But Portage is...

Broken?

I killed my Gentoo install when it failed compiling some new ebuild, or just while upgrading, again. And after getting tired of it beeping while compiling Mozilla more often then if someone was typing their thesis in vi in command mode.

Meanwhile everything compiles with FreeBSD on the same computer. So, hey...