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FreeBSD Ports Tricks

Posted by michael on from the sit-up-and-beg dept.

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."

2 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. Kudos to the author! by dodell · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    www.sitetronics.com/wordpress
  2. Envy by __aavhli5779 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.