BSD Version Of Gentoo's Portage 155
eugene ts wong writes "Here is some good news for BSD users. Gentoo Weekly Newsletter has an article that says that there is a BSD version of portage. It's still in a developmental stage, but it's definitely making progress."
Re:Splitting the user base! (Score:3, Interesting)
ports vs. portage is a debate of utility. Its a meta-tool; how do I get the tools that I need in a better manner (* Better to be defined by the user). I sincerely doubt that the tipping point between selecting gentoo and FreeBSD is the difference in a metatool.
Re:Splitting the user base! (Score:2)
Re:Splitting the user base! (Score:5, Insightful)
2) FreeBSD is not about speed really, though it is fast, and in many ways faster than Linux. FreeBSD is about a system. Not a kernel with 24 vendor specific patches (I honestly can't read the patch version on my current RH kernel, nor do I bother to look it up) with a billion RPMs each with their own vendor specific patches or apt dpkges and a few tarballs here and there, but a cohesive system. The problem that "BSD SUXXORS" dorks have with FreeBSD is that its beauty is subtle; you don't really get it until you've had the system for a while and you realize how everything just feels right. They don't switch scheduler and VMs in the middle of a "stable" branch. They don't make you change firewall code with every major kernel release. It just works, and works well. If chasing every RPM, worrying abut what vendor has what is what you like doing, cool, go for it. But BSD users (like myself) will be quite happy with what we chose, for reasons you can't seem to understand.
Re:Splitting the user base! (Score:1)
Re:Splitting the user base! (Score:2)
Thankfully, it's FreeBSD you're talking about, and not another unnamed BSD system that I am aware of
Re:Splitting the user base! (Score:2)
Re:Splitting the user base! (Score:1)
Re:Splitting the user base! (Score:1)
Re:Splitting the user base! (Score:2)
Re:Splitting the user base! (Score:2)
Because BSD prefers being better for upstream maintainers than for end users. Why in the hell would I want to do a whereis every time I need to find some random binary that freebsd thinks should go in
In deb, everything goes in standardized paths
Re:Splitting the user base! (Score:1)
Re:Splitting the user base! (Score:1)
Re:Splitting the user base! (Score:2)
Sourcemage GNU/Linux [sourcemage.org] might be more up your alley - from my experience, you "cast -c" a program, it downloads it from the program's main site and compiles it.
That's real nice, and why I'm moving from Head Rat to Sourcemage.
-uso.
Re:Splitting the user base! (Score:1)
-uso.
Re:Splitting the user base! (Score:2, Funny)
dependencies or rpm based systems (Score:1)
automated dependency resolution (and a lot more) for rpm based systems: Red Carpet [ximian.com]
and if you need something that ximian doesn't have in their database you just pull it's dependency libraries from redcarpet and build it from an srpm. things definitely aren't as tough as they used to be
I have no experience with BSD, and I'm sure ports is great, but it isn't the only game in town anymore
That's great. (Score:2)
Now having said that, I agree about FreeBSD. It does rock that it's one complete operating system. I do have to point out, however, that there's a much bigger difference between OpenBSD and FreeBSD than there is between, say, Red Hat and Slackware. At least between two Linux distributions most of the kernel is the same. ;-D
this is from a Gentoo, FreeBSD, and OS X user. No need for flames.
Not good news (Score:5, Insightful)
Shortcoming #1: (Score:2)
Re:Shortcoming #1: (Score:5, Informative)
There already are "USE" flags of a sort, but they're more specific than the general purpose flags that Gentoo uses. Adding some new flags should be a piece of cake, if you can convince the committers of their need.
Re:Shortcoming #1: (Score:1)
To the poster: nobody's asking anyone to "throw out stable and robust ports". Wherever did you get that idea? The whole GentooBSD project seems more to be an exploration of an alternate way to manage and maintain a BSD-based system. I don't think that the authors intend this to replace or usurp existing distributions of FreeBSD
Re:Shortcoming #1: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Shortcoming #1: (Score:2)
Re:Not good news (Score:2)
Since Gentoo's Portage is based on Ports, wouldn't this just be them giving back to community they borrowed from?
Re:Not good news (Score:2)
Re:Not good news (Score:2)
Anyway, though I use and enjoy Gentoo, I've never really understood the logic of writing something as integral to the system as Portage in a language that requires an interpreter to function. One would think that system code should just run by itself.
Re:Not good news (Score:1)
Well, Gentoo's all about choice. Writing the integral system (i.e. Portage) portions in Python (or any other interpreted language) would make it a lot more portable to other systems, as the interps translate the Python (or whatever language) code into the sys
Ease of Use for Package Management (Score:4, Interesting)
I think that these general advantages should be available all across the board for all OSes, unless of course there are specific needs for specific alternatives.
I'm not trying to start a flame war or anything. I'm just sharing my own likes & dislikes.
Re:Ease of Use for Package Management (Score:5, Informative)
The cool thing about ports in relation to freebsd, and prolyl the other bsd's.. is that they integrate with the package systems used. SO if you want, you can download the tbz (vs tgz) package or use
Re:Ease of Use for Package Management (Score:1)
Wish List (Score:2)
Re:Wish List (Score:1)
If a user only updated their PHP portage directory, and if the PHP ebuild were properly written to require the most current or known-good versions of all of its dependencies (as tested by the PHP ebuild maintainers), then t
Re:Wish List (Score:1)
Yeah, I hear you on that. I kind of learned that the hard way. I'm suprised that they don't have a command to upgrade all packages to the most recent stable ebuild. How hard can it be? I'm not skilled in understanding it
Re:Wish List (Score:2)
Portage already does everything you just mentioned. Portage has stable and unstable "profiles" which will automatically update all your software to either the newest stable version or the newest version overall respectively. You can change which profile you are in at any time, or you can stick to stable and emerge individual packages from the unstable profile. Usually I stick to the stable tree for libraries and things like that that contribute to overall system stability and then manually install some unst
Re:Ease of Use for Package Management (Score:1)
Then again, I would guess that most Gentoo users prefer to compile their ebuilds locally, for reasons of performance, optimizations, and custom USE flags.
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
The differences I've noted is that portage is upgraded every now and then which gives you the small trouble of running etc-update and upgrade it's config files. It might actually be broken at some times to.
Ports on the other side is rock solid and has been used for a much longer time. You can of course set compiler flags for ports to, and atleast for freebsd the upgrade tool is as good as the gentoo one. I do however like netbsds approch most since their pkgsrc seems most intelligent with their /usr/pkg path for everything installed from it. I must admit I don't know that much about their different port handling tools thought, I've mostly used make install.
The huge advantage of gentoos portage is the USE-flags, which I really like. Don't know if it would be hard to get the same functionallity in the BSDs without using portage, or if there already are a few alternatives which works almost the same way. Feel free to reply or e-mail me information about usefull ports tools if you have any.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
There are things in FreeBSD that work almost the same way. But they tend to be much more specific than what Gentoo users are used to. They're informally called "knobs" and can be put in the global
Re:Why? (Score:1)
Re:Why? (Score:1)
Combined they make a very good package system to. Don't know if make update handles depend
Portage versus Ports? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Portage versus Ports? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Portage versus Ports? -- IMHO/IMOE (Score:3, Informative)
The FreeBSD's ports' Makefile basically sets a load of build/package organization variables, almost the same as a portage "ebuild" does. An ebuild is a script though. I've submitted a few when I was trying out Gentoo a while ago.
Portage just happens to be written in python (good choice BTW IMHO) whereas the traditional pkg-tools for FreeBSD are C based and the portupgrade utility is written in Ruby.
Portage was i
Re:Portage versus Ports? -- IMHO/IMOE (Score:1)
I know that, I just wanted to tell that portage didn't used Makefiles to make it work.
Portage was inspired by NetBSD's pkgsrc which was derived from FreeBSD ports. Flags like PROVIDES are similar to USE and somewhat comparable to FreeBSD's make options for ports e.g. "NO_GUI"=true and stuff like that. I do like the USE idea though.
I actually didn't thought about that possibility, even thought I've used it som
Re:Portage versus Ports? (Score:2)
I like Python and use it often, but makefiles are highly specialised for this sort of thing, so I don't really think that Python is appropriate here.
This capability already exists within the BSD ports collection, with slightly different syntax. For example, I normally install new versions of Mozilla as such: /usr/ports/www/mozilla
# cd
Re:Portage versus Ports? (Score:1)
"-gnome" would be much more useful example, since there are many apps that can be built with or without gnome support, but I am not aware of any that Qt applications that can optionally use KDE. If you don't want to build any KDE applications, then simply don't build any KDE applications. Since nothing but KDE applications depend on KDE, this is the simplest solution.
Re:Portage versus Ports? (Score:2)
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/use-howto.xml
Gentoo (Score:3, Insightful)
Rus
Changes to ports (Score:2)
Re:Changes to ports (Score:3, Informative)
Use portupgrade -m "BATCH=yes", and no user input will be required. You can also set the variables that you want your ports to be built with in /etc/make.conf, or, more flexibly, in /usr/local/etc/pkgtools.conf, based on the ports name (including wildcards). This is a good idea anyway, because you don't have to remember all these options, t
Re:Changes to ports (Score:2)
Thanks for the advice, I'll probably write some updates to the ports section of the handbook and see if they get accepted in the next few weeks.
Re:Changes to ports (Score:2)
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:1, Funny)
Why?
Re:Why? (Score:1)
Maybe they're getting redy to leave the ship if the SCO racket goes out of hands. I wouldn't mind using a different kernel (if it is as good as BSD's), but I don't really feel like learning new maintnance tools.
This reminds me... (Score:2)
"Canada? Why should I leave America to go to America junior?"
good (Score:1)
I for one am glad to see it
Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
I use Fink now, but I don't have flexibility in deciding what features I wish to have compiled in to my software (at least, not that I am aware of).
also coming soon... (Score:5, Funny)
vi bindings for emacs (Score:2)
viper or something?
cross-platform package managment (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason portage is better (Score:1)
Re:The reason portage is better (Score:1)
The software is only the smallest part (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The software is only the smallest part (Score:1)
As to the number of packages, let me refer you to this URL:
Gentoo list of packages [gentoo.org]
The current count was 5280 when I last checked. Computation of percentage is left as an exercise for the reader. ;)
And, as always, users are encouraged to submit their
Re:The software is only the smallest part (Score:2)
And this will help someone wanting to use portage under FreeBSD how exactly?
The story, AIUI, was about someone porting portage to FBSD, not the people trying to create a hybred BSD/Gentoo system.
Good news? (Score:2)
Why the hell do we need portage? We've already got our system. It works (for us) better than portage. We don't need it. Stop wasting your time.
Re:Good news? (Score:1)
Why does it matter if people "waste" their time on this? Does it hurt your ego to see people working on Gentoo BSD? Are you the sole arbiter of what *BSD-related projects are wastes of other people's time? More importantly, who asked you?
What if, by some chance, Gentoo BSD happens to provide a better package management system than the standard package management systems? What if portage meets people's needs better than
Re:Good news? (Score:1)
On a different note, I don't like Linux anyway and, unless Gentoo BSD is going to offer some kille
But Why? We have Ports already (Score:2)
If someone can explain a good reason, ficool.. but i as of yet, really dont see a point. And it can only cause issues. One nice thing about the ports tree, is its 'the' ports tree.. no confusion involved.
Re:But Why? We have Ports already (Score:1)
The "issues" that people encounter when using a new package management system are positive forces for change. A fresh approach to software management will help de
Fact Based Opinions (Score:2)
That aside, if you had fully understood what I said. you would have realized I'm not against change. I just feel that there needs to be a valid case to consider it. I also clearly stated i did NOT know the portage system, thus looking for others to assist in the rational..
So far, you haven't given me any valid reasons, nor does the typical sounding Linux crowd's "you don't know what you are talking about so shut up" attitude that leaked thru doesn't help the case.
Re:What they don't want you to hear... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What I know about *BSD (Score:1, Informative)