Ports and packages
- From: Steve <SteveSpamTrap@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2006 13:41:27 -0500
About a week and a half ago I loaded FreeBSD 6.0 on my ThinkPad laptop with
a 1 GHz processor. This machine is for email and web surfing (KDE), word
processing (OpenOffice), and some light Java development (Eclipse)... other
than that there isn't any software installed.
As soon as I got everything up and running, I CVSup'ed and watch
portupgrade spend the next four days straight updating KDE and OpenOffice.
When that finished I ran CVSup again, and have spent the past couple of
days compiling NEW updates to KDE and OpenOffice. This machine has been
compiling continously since I first turned it on over a week ago, and even
though I have a small number of ports installed it seems that they update
faster than I can compile.
I have read the packages and ports section of the FreeBSD Handbook, and
understand at a basic level what tools are available. However, there seems
to be little or no documentation about best practices, so I there are a
couple of questions I wanted to ask the community:
- Have I just been INCREDIBLY unlucky with my timing, or do new port
snapshot versions really come out once every week or two for huge
applications like KDE or OpenOffice? Is it even possible for someone with
a non-trivial amount of software to stay current with the ports system?
- What do you use to update software on your PC or workstation box? I can
see the value of building from source for a rack-mounted box serving a
specialize purpose, but for a PC or laptop environment I just don't see any
advantages for the ports system at all.
- The FreeBSD Handbook tells you how to set an environmental variable to
determine whether "pkg" tools pull from the RELEASE, STABLE, or CURRENT
branches. Does the ports collection match up with CURRENT, or is it some
kind of "HYPER-CURRENT" branch that is more bleeding-edge than CURRENT?
Can you control the state of your ports collection? I'm just not sure how
ports and pkg's are supposed to work together... I would basically like to
be running a STABLE system, but does that mean I am prohibited from using
the ports tools?
.
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