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DragonFly BSD 3.4 Released, With New Packaging System
An anonymous reader writes "DragonFly BSD has released version 3.4. This version is the first BSD to support GCC 4.7, and contains a new experimental Aptitude-like binary package installed called DPorts, which uses the FreeBSD ports collection as a base."
The regular package management for BSDs, the ports collection, is not like .rpm or .deb at all. The closest Linux equivilent would be Gentoo, since it was based on Ports, and improved upon from there (improved in the opinion of the people doing the improving anyway.) Everything there is compiled from source based on some pretty beefy makefiles.
I don't know much about this new package system, but if it's based on Aptitude, it's probably better to compare it to apt-get or Yum than to .rpm and .deb.
One big difference between *BSD and most Linux systems is that a *BSD system consists of a base system plus packages. With a lot of the Linux systems, the whole system consists of packages. So for example, with a Debian system, your kernel is managed with apt thus it is managed with a package manager. In *BSD, the kernel is part of the base system.
Wikipedia has a rather well written article on FreeBSD's ports system (and being that FreeBSD has the largest user base of the *BSDs, it is often thought of as "the BSD system"). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_Ports
Additionally, it may be worth noting that FreeBSD is transitioning over to a new binary package system called "pkgng", (to replace pkg_add, not ports). I don't personally know much about it, but the trusty old FreeBSD handbook has a section on it: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/pkgng-intro.html
FreeBSD has had packages for years. It's not transitioning, it's allowing another option.
Ports in FreeBSD, in my experience, if you follow a production-like attitude, rather than an ADD OH-NOEZ-THIS-PORT-IS-30-SECONDS-OUT-OF-DATE-MUST-UPDATE methodology, works better than any package manager I've seen (rpm, deb, yum, apt).
The BSD package systems tend to be more like apt or yum, than simple rpm/deb. They grab your binary packages and their dependencies automatically.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
You missed the entire point. In BSD the kernel is not itself a package. In linux the kernel is a package just like any other package. THAT's why he is informative.
The regular package management for BSDs, the ports collection
The regular package management for BSDs is the pkg utilities, the ports collection is a source control tree of available software that you compile yourself.
To be fair, only FreeBSD uses the Ports Collection, but also uses 'pkg' which fetches precompiled binaries and installs them and handles dependancies, which is pretty much exactly like apt and rpm. NetBSD and IIRC, OpenBSD both use pkgsrc, which also fetches binary packages, exactly like apt and rpm. All three have had this sort of package management forever.