oops, being a bit new to slashdot, i forgot to change the format method so my post is a lot harder to read, oh well i wont be making that mistake again:)
I've used both Gentoo and FreeBSD and yes, there are similarities between the ports system used in FreeBSD and the portage system in Gentoo, although the actual way they are run is fairly different.
For example in Gentoo you would install gaim by typing 'emerge gaim' compared to 'cd/usr/ports/net/gaim' then 'make install clean' in FreeBSD.
Gentoo did have some nice ideas, such as USE flags, where you could define flags that would effect build options on any relevant programs, for example if you had the use flag +mysql defined then any programs that had optional mysql components in them would be compiled with them. Whereas -mysql would ensure that any programs with optional mysql support would definetly not be compiled with mysql support.
Another nice feature of ports is package masking where packages that are reported to be unstable on certain architectures wouldnt install on that architecture (although you could override this if you didnt care about the potential instability)
It was also fairly simple to upgrade programs in gentoo (could be just as easy in FreeBSD too, but i've not been using it for long so cant be too sure) since all you had to do was run 'emerge sync' to update the portage tree and then 'emerge -u world' to update all the installed programs (or you could specify individual programs instead of world)
Anyways, thats enough talk of portage from me:)
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oops, being a bit new to slashdot, i forgot to change the format method so my post is a lot harder to read, oh well i wont be making that mistake again :)
I've used both Gentoo and FreeBSD and yes, there are similarities between the ports system used in FreeBSD and the portage system in Gentoo, although the actual way they are run is fairly different. For example in Gentoo you would install gaim by typing 'emerge gaim' compared to 'cd /usr/ports/net/gaim' then 'make install clean' in FreeBSD.
Gentoo did have some nice ideas, such as USE flags, where you could define flags that would effect build options on any relevant programs, for example if you had the use flag +mysql defined then any programs that had optional mysql components in them would be compiled with them. Whereas -mysql would ensure that any programs with optional mysql support would definetly not be compiled with mysql support.
Another nice feature of ports is package masking where packages that are reported to be unstable on certain architectures wouldnt install on that architecture (although you could override this if you didnt care about the potential instability)
It was also fairly simple to upgrade programs in gentoo (could be just as easy in FreeBSD too, but i've not been using it for long so cant be too sure) since all you had to do was run 'emerge sync' to update the portage tree and then 'emerge -u world' to update all the installed programs (or you could specify individual programs instead of world)
Anyways, thats enough talk of portage from me :)