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FreeBSD Ports Collection Breaks 10,000 Ports
sremick writes "After breaking the 9,000 mark in July, the FreeBSD ports collection was well on its way of crossing 10,000 by the end of 2003. Sure enough, we made it! According to freshports, the number of ports in the FreeBSD ports tree currently stands at 10,015. This little graph is also nice, though not completely current. Way to go, FreeBSD!"
... and three of them are mine.
Makes one realize how insignificant one's own contribution is, when one has contributed less than 0.03% of the total.
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I'm wondering how the work on merging FreeBSD Ports, Gentoo portage and Fink is coming along. There was an announcement that the groups where working on a Centeralized port systems (Together). 1 ports for every paltform. Then you could apt-get, emerge, pkgadd, rpm, whatever...
The saved man hours in a centeralized ports system would be amazing.
Even more man-hours would be saved if people wrote in ISO C using only POSIX functionality, without littering their code with Linux-isms, or worse still distribution-specific things. Creating a package is relatively easy once you can make the code compile.
For something done right, look at Psi. The same code builds on Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Windows and Mac. When the first Mac version was released, none of the developers even had a Mac (they just compiled it on someone else's machine). This is possible by coding to cross-platform APIs (in the case of Psi, the only dependency is Qt, which runs almost anywhere).
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If people only used the "standard" interfaces then the 'void' extention to K&R would never have gotten enough widespread use to be included in ANSI. Nobody would use the better select-like interfaces (epoll, kqueue) and we would never find out which should be included as a "standard" next time around. Oh, and no threads. And more buffer overuns because strlcpy won't be used just strncpy (which gets misapplied and allows buffer overuns more offen then not due to poor interfaces).
The people that push the envlope are the ones that influance the next standards.
(That's not to say one should go use sendfile/splice when you have no need, but if you need the performance, don't shy away)
In fact, everything on my system is either part of the base or was installed via ports. This includes perl CPAN modules, which have their own entries in the ports tree.
Freshports' categories list is a great way to browse the contents of the FreeBSD ports tree.