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."

Comments

Re:Ease of Use for Package Management

[sporty]

Do realize, that ports has done this for a long time. Only diff beween ports and portage are the command structure, some layout and the systems that they originated for.

The cool thing about ports in relation to freebsd, and prolyl the other bsd's.. is that they integrate with the package systems used. SO if you want, you can download the tbz (vs tgz) package or use /usr/ports.

Why?

[aliquis]

Then I first tried gentoo I thought portage was better than ports, but that was because I hadn't read the onlamp article about portupgrade.

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.

also coming soon...

[bcrowell]

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• a Windows skin for MacOS X