Twentieth anniversary of the FreeBSD Ports Tree

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in bsd on (#2QW8)
Twenty years ago a guy by the name of Jordan Hubbard began the first FreeBSD ports tree. Two decades later it's an essential part of any FreeBSD install, allowing source code-level access to a huge ecosystem of software, all installable in either binary package or make-config-install format. That's not Jordan's only contribution either: FreeBSD owes sysinstall and the original package management system to him as well (retired in FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE for a next generation system).

In commemoration of the big 2-0, BSDFrance commissioned this video. It's quite well done.

BSD/Linux users, what are your opinions of the ports tree vs. repositories vs. app stores? Happy 20th, FreeBSD Ports Tree.

[Ed. note: 2014-08-27 21:18 thrilled to see we now have our very own BSD topic. About time; there have been several BSD articles here!]

Re: Dependency management? (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-08-28 16:46 (#2R9C)

Probably better than it did a year ago. I've just updated a FreeBSD server from 9.0 to 10.0 and one of the major changes is the new package management system: pkgng or something ("next generation"). I'm still finding my way around it, but initial impressions are favorable. I very infrequently have to compile packages these days, so the pkg system is almost indistinguishable from apt-get. I have yet to find a busted port, but give me time, if I try ...
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