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BSD Version Of Gentoo's Portage
eugene ts wong writes "Here is some good news for BSD users. Gentoo Weekly Newsletter has an article that says that there is a BSD version of portage. It's still in a developmental stage, but it's definitely making progress."
Efforts like this could end up splitting the Gentoo user base. Will he go to BSD and kill Gentoo as we know it, or will he stay with Linux? :(
Most BSD users don't want this. Ports works quite well for us, thank you very much. Any shortcomings that Ports has, are being worked on.
1 of the things that I like about portage is the ease of use. You don't have to find dependencies. Nor do you have to find the web sites that host these packages. If you can find a place that's closer than the defaults, then you'll have the option of getting packages from there.
I think that these general advantages should be available all across the board for all OSes, unless of course there are specific needs for specific alternatives.
I'm not trying to start a flame war or anything. I'm just sharing my own likes & dislikes.
testing out my trending skills
The differences I've noted is that portage is upgraded every now and then which gives you the small trouble of running etc-update and upgrade it's config files. It might actually be broken at some times to.
Ports on the other side is rock solid and has been used for a much longer time. You can of course set compiler flags for ports to, and atleast for freebsd the upgrade tool is as good as the gentoo one. I do however like netbsds approch most since their pkgsrc seems most intelligent with their /usr/pkg path for everything installed from it. I must admit I don't know that much about their different port handling tools thought, I've mostly used make install.
The huge advantage of gentoos portage is the USE-flags, which I really like. Don't know if it would be hard to get the same functionallity in the BSDs without using portage, or if there already are a few alternatives which works almost the same way. Feel free to reply or e-mail me information about usefull ports tools if you have any.
As a FreeBSD user, my question is this: How exactly is this different from the ports tree? I thought that it was basically the same. I am glad to see somebody doing it, though.
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I can't see the difference. If anything pkg_add -r would almost be suprior
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The big question on my mind is "why?" Why would I want to use portage instead of ports? Why would I want to use a copy when I already have the original?
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I like the ports system n' all, but I certainly like portage a lot better. :)!
I for one am glad to see it
--- If I had a funny sig too, you might be laughing now.
I see absolutely zero need for Portage on any of the popular BSD systems, except for Mac OS X. Having it on Mac OS X would be much better than using Fink.
I use Fink now, but I don't have flexibility in deciding what features I wish to have compiled in to my software (at least, not that I am aware of).
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1 thing that I hope that they add is the abiblity to not update the entire portage tree. Otherwise, we are forced to download way too much data that we may never use, when all we want to do is update the packages that we have already.
testing out my trending skills
Portage doesn't replace makefiles, at least not the ones provided to build the actual program.
The FreeBSD's ports' Makefile basically sets a load of build/package organization variables, almost the same as a portage "ebuild" does. An ebuild is a script though. I've submitted a few when I was trying out Gentoo a while ago.
Portage just happens to be written in python (good choice BTW IMHO) whereas the traditional pkg-tools for FreeBSD are C based and the portupgrade utility is written in Ruby.
Portage was inspired by NetBSD's pkgsrc which was derived from FreeBSD ports. Flags like PROVIDES are similar to USE and somewhat comparable to FreeBSD's make options for ports e.g. "NO_GUI"=true and stuff like that. I do like the USE idea though.
The interesting thing about portage as a FreeBSD user is two sided really: the pro would be that the functionality of portupgrade would be part of the portmanager tool (portage) itself, the con is that *BSD (even Net) are not a kernel with packaged userland, it is a full (perhaps small though) OS and the hard thing is always where to draw the line and whether or not the base system can and should be put into packages/ports/ebuilds also. Like any OS Gentoo Linux needs a bootstrap and a chaintool too to build the rest. LFS'ish (quite easy though, they have good docs).
The Gentoo "rc scripts" are also very NetBSD inspired and recently FreeBSD has followed this approach, e.g. using PROVIDES, and BEFORE, etc.
My (rather short) experience with portage was that I liked it, but it's definately more geared towards a linux (kernel+tools+pkgs) system. It also broke quite frequently though. And of course, python is always nice, if only to unbreak little things easily (I'm not much of a C person).
First off, I love FreeBSD. I run FreeBSD on every system I own. FreeBSD simply rules. It's so clean, compact, organized, secure, fast, stable, sweet, kick ass, and kick fucking ass; but seriously - it's not perfect. I personally think package managment needs a lot of work. The Debian packaging system is by far superior to anything out there, and with apt-get you cannot loose. Pkg-add just sucks ass compared to debians tools. And Ports just gets messy really quick. Upgrading ports is damn ugly, especially with multiple dependancies. Anything to improve managing software on BSD is a good thing. I wish someone would write an application similar to WindowsUpdate for BSD. Don't flame me! Applying patches should be that easy on BSD (Click the check-mark and press install, done!).
Package managment is probably one of the most important things to have on a system. Installing, upgrading, and removing software should be simple, reliable, and accessable. Sure, Ports may offer some of this, but there's room for improvement. Portage can teach us something. Lets learn from Portage's ass kickedness and improve ports more!
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You need to bathe more often, you are not a Marine in Iraq.
USE flags. Gimme USE flags and I will concur that ports are OK.
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As usual, when this comes up, let's plug NetBSD's Packages Collection. ``pkgsrc'', as it's known, originally derived from FreeBSD's ports is available for a large number of platforms (Netbsd, of course, and then Darwin, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, Solaris and Irix), thus allowing system administrators who have to take care of more than one OS to take advantage of its strengths. So, uhm, sorry, but I'd also have to add my vote to the ``who needs portage'' camp.
-- "Tradition is the illusion of permanence."
I know that, I just wanted to tell that portage didn't used Makefiles to make it work.
Portage was inspired by NetBSD's pkgsrc which was derived from FreeBSD ports. Flags like PROVIDES are similar to USE and somewhat comparable to FreeBSD's make options for ports e.g. "NO_GUI"=true and stuff like that. I do like the USE idea though.
I actually didn't thought about that possibility, even thought I've used it sometimes. But sure the USE-flags is more convenient. Will make for the BSD ports complain if the option isn't available? If not i suppose it would be quite easy to do your own script which just add the options you want in BSD aswell.
The Gentoo "rc scripts" are also very NetBSD inspired and recently FreeBSD has followed this approach, e.g. using PROVIDES, and BEFORE, etc.
Never heard of PROVIDES or BEFORE earlier, will ask google about that one.
Personally I like NetBSD most, but it got nothing with ports vs portage to do, it's just that all the BSDs got excellent documentation and that NetBSD has the files in intelligent places and that you don't have to upgrade the whole OS so often. OpenBSD is ok aswell but fails a little on the desktop side, and it's nice to see FreeBSD 5.x uses gcc 3.x now adays. Currently my machine runs gentoo since a half year or something because I bought a new one back then and wanted to try it out. We'll see then I have enough time and energy to switch back.
Who is going to meta-port the 7000 (or whatever it is) ports to whatever format portage needs it's information in and then keep them up to date?
_O_
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I have a cron job which does a daily cvsup and `portupgrade -aRr' (disclaimer: Doing this on a production server is a bad idea. Always check ports before deploying them. On a workstation, however, in the unlikely event that it breaks I can spend some time avoiding work while I figure out why:). The problem with this is that some ports (e.g. ghostscript and php) have curses based front-end for selecting make flags. This causes portupgrade to wait for user input (which never happens, since it is not run in a terminal). I would like to see each port which has tweakable options list these in a standard format. Then, a single tool could be used for editing them in an interactive way (rather than a separate, but identical interface for ports like ghostscript and php), and auto-update tools like portupgrade could remember the make settings for each port and reapply the same ones when it was upgraded.
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Did anybody tell the developers that we already have ports? (That they stole portage from, BTW). Wait, wait, we didn't have packages? No... I thought we had pkgsrc...
Why the hell do we need portage? We've already got our system. It works (for us) better than portage. We don't need it. Stop wasting your time.
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Why do you insist upon posting with out the facts? According to NetCraft Surveys (yes, I come from a world where we actually like to quote our sources.) Usage of the BSD's is actually increasing. And by most reports (including e-week, and linuxworld) *BSD's are more stable than any other system out there. Before you decide to make another idiot comment to make yourself feel better about who you are try to get the facts straight.
automated dependency resolution (and a lot more) for rpm based systems: Red Carpet
and if you need something that ximian doesn't have in their database you just pull it's dependency libraries from redcarpet and build it from an srpm. things definitely aren't as tough as they used to be
I have no experience with BSD, and I'm sure ports is great, but it isn't the only game in town anymore
Don't they already exist?
viper or something?
1. You can not play games on it. 2. It cannot be used by my grandma. 3. It lacks a GUI of any note. 4. There is no support available for it. 5. It is an assortment of fragmented OSes. 6. It cannot be run on the x86 platform. 7. You have to compile everything and know C. 8. Support for the latest hardware is always poor. 9. It is incompatiable with GNU/Linux. 10.It is dying. 1. Of course you can play games on it. 2. Sure it can. 3. You can use any popular GUI. wm, KDE, GNOME etc. 4. Are you too stupid to figure out mailing lists? 5. No, it's not. 6. Ehm. Yes it can. 7. Wrong again. 8. Sometimes. Same thing with any *NIX though. 9. ? Wrong wrong wrong. :(
10. Hah! Not hardly.
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Does this mean that Gentoo is dying? :)
This would make an interesting subject for a book.
Not to sound like a troll here, but i really dont see the point since we have a well-oiled ports system already?
If someone can explain a good reason, ficool.. but i as of yet, really dont see a point. And it can only cause issues. One nice thing about the ports tree, is its 'the' ports tree.. no confusion involved.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
How nice, to toss in an insult at the end.
That aside, if you had fully understood what I said. you would have realized I'm not against change. I just feel that there needs to be a valid case to consider it. I also clearly stated i did NOT know the portage system, thus looking for others to assist in the rational..
So far, you haven't given me any valid reasons, nor does the typical sounding Linux crowd's "you don't know what you are talking about so shut up" attitude that leaked thru doesn't help the case. That's one reason I left the Linux camp, after being in it since the very beginning on Usenet
Consistency and maturity are two of the main advantages of the BSD's.. The main reason I, and many others in the 'real' ( real, as in not hobby ) world have chosen or moved too, *BSD. ( and the license wars )
Fragmenting the 'ports' goes a long way to destroy that consistency, unless there is a damned good reason to do so.
Just because its 'new and improved' is NOT a reason to do it. This would bring the BSD's down to the level of today's Linux world, fragmented and convoluted, to the point of being a detriment.
Also keep in mind very few people actually understand how to use ports properly, which if done would most likely remove anyone's 'issues' with it. Its actually well thought out and extremely flexible, if used the right way.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Now having said that, I agree about FreeBSD. It does rock that it's one complete operating system. I do have to point out, however, that there's a much bigger difference between OpenBSD and FreeBSD than there is between, say, Red Hat and Slackware. At least between two Linux distributions most of the kernel is the same.
this is from a Gentoo, FreeBSD, and OS X user. No need for flames.
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Why would you bother porting a ports clone back to the system that spawned (and still uses) it? Why would you create a linux distribution with the intention of making it BSD-like? Why not just use a BSD?
I thought this was why slackware died.
Indeed it is common knowledge that ever hapless *BSD continues to be mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. Look at the cold numbers. The erosion of user base for FreeBSD continues in a dizzying, head spinning downward spiral.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of BSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major marketing surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among hobbyist dilettante dabblers. If truth, for all practical purposes *BSD is already dead. It is a dead man walking.
Fact: *BSD is dying
Take a dead skunk pussy whore, stuff a mackeral up here cunt. Stuff her in bag of wetback excrement. Let the bag ferment in the sun for a week, the bury it in a landfill. Dig it up a year later and take a whiff.
That's what BSD smells like.
It's de first time I browse along the *BSD news topic in SlashDot, and all that I can see is:
Why TF are all those no-brainers talking about that stupid gay-like phrase "BSD is dying!!, *BSD is dying!!"?
I'm sure that all of that "i use linux, cause i'm kool!" kiddies doesn't used any version of *BSD. And you can't criticize *BSD if you even haven't tried it. And yes, I can see many posts are from ignorant linux zealots that doesn't know nothing about *BSD. Some of these even think that *BSD doesn't run in x86!!! (what???)
What is this crap about? People in Linux camp doesn't like competitors? Is the really linux for people who hates Microsoft? And nowe they hate BSD too?
Sorry, but i don't like these attitude. I prefer go to more mature *BSD community sites.
BSDERO
It hurts 'n' stuff.
BSD isn't merely dead,
It is really, most sincerely dead.
Where is the evidence? Or do you not have any idea what the word "irrefutable" means?
And before you spout any netcraft BS, let me refute that right now:
There is more to *BSD than just webservers.
Looks pretty refutable to me. Move along, trollboi.