[ale] Notes from FreeBSD 7, Solaris 10

[Dylan Northrup]

A long time ago, (18.04.08), in a galaxy far, far away, GLA wrote:

:=I also found that although the primary ports system for install requires gentoo style compile of everything - they do have a sane binary package system that allows you to do 'pkg-add -r foo' and it will pull full off a server and install it.

I understand it's not for everyone, but I like the idea of downloading
source and compiling against local libraries on my system.  The other thing
ports has (and had long before yum or such existed) is automatic dependency
tracking and installation.  Back before the same thing existed for Linux
(outside of Gentoo), it was the best way for me to maintain my sanity and
almost made me forget the hell of incompatible, but inter-dependent RPM
requirements.

:=Last note on BSD - I crashed it twice in the first day. The first time, I unplugged a USB harddrive right after I'd plugged it in, before it had settled - and got a kernel segfault. Second time I forget what happened but it froze. Not what I'd expected since I'd always heard it was rock solid.

I haven't done much work with BSD's USB support.  The system's very solid
from a network appliance perspective (put some disk on it, hook a network
cable to it and let it run).  I've not had a lot of experience using FBSD as
a desktop, so YMMV on that.

:=There are Sun packages, then several other unofficial package respositories (like Blastwave). Sun packages put themselves under various parts of /usr. Other repositories create a whole /usr/{lib,bin,share,...} tree under /opt and you control what get searched when by setting $PATH.
:=
:=The end result, was that although the default system includes a full gnome install... when I did a 'pkg-get pidgin' on the blastwave repository, it proceeded to install 50 different gnome dependencies into /opt/ that were already installed in the system under /usr.

Third-party support for pre-built binary packages has the liability of
everyone not agreeing where to put their stuff (and, to be fair, Solaris has
had a few different locations for third party apps over the years).

-- 
Dylan Northrup - docx at io.com - http://www.io.com/~docx/
"Harder to work, harder to strive, hard to be glad to be alive, but it's
 really worth it if you give it a try." -- Cowboy Mouth, 'Easy'