On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 18:42, David Chisnall
<theraven@sucs.org> wrote:
On 24 Mar 2011, at 15:51, Martin Dietze wrote:
FreeBSD lets you update third-party packages independently of the core OS. This seems much more sane than the approach of most Linux distributions, where they try to make third-party packages conform to the distribution's release cycle, but I suppose that's required since everything in a Linux distribution is a third-party package.
I can install third-party .debs on Debian and Ubuntu whenever I want, and add third party repositories. In fact, as you know, Debian has unstable and testing, and even experimental. Dependency checks can cause issues, but so they can on FreeBSD, right?
Dirk Meyer does a really good job of keeping GNUstep ports (used to build packages on FreeBSD) up to date, so you can typically just update your installed packages and get the latest versions of stuff.
The gnustep port is a metaport, which just depends on a load of GNUstep stuff. When you run this command, it grabs the latest versions and compiles them. You can add -P to grab the binary packages if you prefer, although this won't work for anything that's GPLv3 or has a license that prohibits binary distribution. Since the GNUstep tools are now GPLv3, we no longer have pre-built binaries for FreeBSD, so you need to build from ports.
Speaking of *BSD and ports… Is anyone working on MacPorts packaging? It looks abandoned. I tried to set up a local MacPorts repository and update the Portfile, but I'm confused by how Portfile specifies where to get .tar.gz from. Overall, I'm not sure how the entire system works.