Re: 6.0 post-install questions

Philip Paeps <philip+usenet@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

I can't even see the slightest relationship or overlap in the way FreeBSD does
package management (ports, pkg_* tools) and Microsoft does (it doesn't).

Let me rephrase it other way. The way Microsoft does it works. The way
the *BSD and Linux do it, in general does not work. Only with a huge
infrastructure with thousand developpers, Debian achieves something barely
usable, by building every package and checking it really works. However
this takes ages and gets really usable when a commercial entity, Canonical
adds its polish to the game. OpenBSD has something really working by
restricting to a drastically small set of ports and checking them carefully.
FreeBSD has the great virtue of providing a gigantic set of ports, like
Debian, but they may work or not, you may upgrade them or the upgrade may
break, etc. This is very nice if you like to live dangerously. The conclusion
i draw from these *facts* is that the idea of a huge set of ports and
libraries with almost infinite interactions which has been thought as a
wonderful achievement of the free software world is far less
robust that the simple techniques that people use in the Microsoft of Apple world.
Throw everything in a directory and erase it when you want to get rid of the
package. Disks are big, trying to make space savings with shared libraries is
a waste of time, and a recipe for disaster. This is the idea that the PC-BSD
people try to exploit.

--

Michel TALON

.

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