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OpenBSD Ports and Packages Explained

Posted by Hemos on from the always-good-to-learn-more dept.

jpkunst writes "As reported on undeadly.org: an interesting interview with OpenBSD developer Marc Espie about the internals of and the philosophy behind the OpenBSD ports and packages system."

2 of 28 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The original 'gentoo' ... explained :) by Curtman · · Score: 4, Interesting
    BSD has been where everything seems to find a crowd of whackos to implement stuff.

    There's a lot of very intelligent people working BSD. I'm a Linux zealot myself, but I really enjoyed reading this interview with Theo de Raadt, and Christos Zoulas. It's very interesting how much they seem to different in what they believe. One of the more striking ones was:

    When we find that a change must be made to the system (security or otherwise) we can therefore force such a change into the system by changing it all the way from userland through the libraries down to the kernel. We can change interfaces as we want to. We can move quickly. Sometimes changes are even made which break previous executables; but if we need to, we can choose to make such decisions.

    This gives us great flexibility to move forward fast. If something is designed wrong, and the fix depends on changes in more than just the kernel, we can fix it by. We change all the required pieces in the right places. We don't need hacks in the wrong place to fix a problem.

    -- Theo de Raadt
    -vs-

    Linux's code is much newer and it keeps constantly being re-factored. This has the nice side effect of keeping the code simple and readable (at the base system layers such as VM and FS), but stability is suffering.

    -- Christos Zoulas

    It's hard to imagine that they are even talking about the same things.
  2. Another Newb by mugnyte · · Score: 4, Interesting


    Like some ./ readers, I got the OpenBSD image when 3.7 was released just this year. I dropped it onto an older box and have been exploring ever since. I used the packages for several items (like Gnome) but ports for others (Postgresql 8).

    I've been very happy with several concepts:

    - The dependency trees are spot-on and very automated. Correct versions and complete coverage.
    - The ability to undo or rollback a package is smooth (like when I took a 7.x Postgres package and pkg_delete'd it to try the port)
    - The published docs, man pages and organization of the system is superb. I picked up "Absolute OpenBSD" and "BSD Hacks" and have been toured confidently around the system by these and the man pages they point to.
    - The post-install notes are a great help.

    For me, it's a great "warm and fuzzy" to gather the documentation sources into a list and be able to dive down rabbit holes for long periods without feeling like a flea market is on my box. Cheers to the BSD folks, especially the package maintainers.