Re: Is FreeBSD just a sandbox for hackers?

On Thu, 30 Oct 2008 06:40:01 +0530, Balwinder S Dheeman wrote:
BTW, compiling, analyzing, fine-tuning and, or debugging a package is
not everyone's cup of tea; why force such absurd policies on to
newcomers.

What a strange thing to say. No one is forcing any policy on newcomers.
There are many ways to solve any problem under Unix. Famous Unix saying:
"provide mechanism, not policy."

Why force a full ports collection update, fetchindex and, or portsnap of
all the 19000+ packages and, or patches when someone is using only
around 700 of these?

There is no forcing. The ports collection is not part of the FreeBSD
base. You're welcome to install applications however you like. The
ports collection is just one way. Pre-built packages are another way
that is closely related. There are others.

You make it sound as though updating the ports collection of 19000+
packages is more of a chore than some particular 700. That is plainly
silly: the whole collection is best thought of as a single "database of
where to find and how to install third-party stuff". Whenever you do an
update, with csup or cvsup or cvs or rdiff or svn, you only perform one
operation, and the data transferred over the network is only that part of
the database that changed since the last time you updated it: usually a
very small amount of data.

The *FreeBSD ports collection* and, or package
management system in its current incarnation *SUCKS*.

You're clearly welcome to your opinion, but I don't share it. I've used
several package management systems, on several Unix-like platforms. None
are perfect, all have their strengths and weaknesses. I happen to like
the tradeoffs that the FreeBSD ports system has made. I particularly
like the easy visibility of what is going on that comes from storing both
the database of available packages and the database of installed files as
simple trees of regular text files.

Just out of interest, what don't you like about it, besides requiring the
database (the ports tree) to reside locally on your computer?

What apples has to with oranges? What if, someone (or FreeBSD
developers) does have a sense of feeling and, or does not even know what
the hell that feeling phenomena is? That one's is not dying, but dead.

I'm afraid you're not making any sense at all here. Could you have a go
at re-phrasing the question?

Cheers,

--
Andrew
.

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