Fw: Time to kill FreeBSD as a Desktop

[Danny Pansters]

On Friday 30 March 2007 00:07:32 Rico Secada wrote:
> Hi All.
>
> I have been using FreeBSD as a desktop system, on serveral computers for
> about one and a half year now. I truly love FreeBSD! But keeping third
> party ports/packages updated is just to timeconsuming IMHO.

First important thing is probably do you need all those updates. There's 
nothing wrong with moving from release to release and using binary packages 
that come with them. Granted, some may still need to be built from source if 
unavailable as a package or if you need certain non-default options. 

> Building everything from ports is ok, on a quick machine, but even on a
> quick machine building KDE takes a LOT of time. Waiting until the stable
> packages are ready takes about 2 - 3 weeks, and until then, a lot of other
> stuff needs to be updated.

Well you can build on one box and use the packages you built there on your 
other boxen. That should resolve at least most of it.

>
> Compared to Debian GNU/Linux's "apt-get update && apt-get dist upgrade"
> command, OR OpenBSD's "pkg-add -u"
>
> >From OpenBSD's man page for "pkg_add":
>
>      -u       Update the given pkgname(s), and anything it depends upon. 
> If no pkgname is given, pkg_add will update all installed packages. This
> relies on PKG_PATH to figure out the new package names.

Though it's not in the base system you can do a package upgrade with 
portupgrade. I'm not sure if the standard pkg-* can do a full upgrade. 

> I really think it is time for FreeBSD to make it more easy to update binary
> packages, like on OpenBSD.

I think we have more archs and more ports and more branches. Things multiply 
with every package and arch and branch. That's not to say it can't be done 
but manpower and equipment are likely lacking.

I dont know about open but debian does have tested and integrated and 
multi-arch packages, but they will be ancient also. One thing I like very 
much about FreeBSD is that (contrary to what some people seem to think) our 
ports (and packages where available) are usually very up to date. 

(as an aside, from the various tinderboxes and from pointyhat you can get the 
latest packages if you must, can't be guaranteed that they work well though 
because no one has used them yet -- also for stable there are packages made 
available against snapshots that go on the FTP servers, though not very 
frequently I think)

Dan