Installation instructions for Firefox somewhere?

[Kevin Kinsey]

Leonard Zettel wrote:

>On Sunday 27 February 2005 04:01 am, Anthony Atkielski wrote:
>  
>
>>John writes:
>>    
>>
>>>If space is tight, running make
>>>distclean after make install helps, as does periodically deleting the
>>>contents of /usr/ports/distfiles
>>>      
>>>
>>Does pkg_add do this?
>>    
>>

There's no need for [one of] the exact reason[s] that has you
already sold on packages instead of ports.  There's nothing "excess"
[much] in a binary package.  If you're install via ports, you get a
source tarball that d'loads to /ports/distfiles, then is uncompressed
and untarred to a "work" subdir in the port directory, where all the '
"config/make/make install" happens.  If you `make install clean` the
port, this subdir is `rm`ed after installation.  If you `make distclean`
the source tarball is removed, also.

>>>[0] if you mean, by "pull the index from an ftp site" cd /usr/ports &&
>>>make index
>>>      
>>>
>>I meant running /stand/sysinstall and selecting an FTP site as the
>>"installation media" for the software.  It always downloads some sort of
>>index when I do that, which I assume is an up-to-date list of all the
>>ports available.
>>    
>>
>
>Being somewhat of a newvie, I should probably not be saying anything,
>but that's the assumption that nailed you.
>
>If I understand the situation correctly, what you got was information
>on *packages* available when the OS version was released, a subset
>of available ports.  And this time around, that list was not in a totally
>self-consistent state.
>
>  
>

I wrote two [one rather long] post[s] yesterday on this.  The conclusion
I drew is that you get an Index coinciding with the 'Release Name' you
have set under sysinstall's "Configure -> Options" menu.  As I do my
ports work in terminals instead of via sysinstall, I can't say *for 
certain*,
and no one authoritative has stepped forward to confirm or deny
my hypothesis.  If you can set this to an appropriate value, you
should get a useable list of packages....


>My own experiences have given me a definite bias toward using the
>ports system to compile stuff to be added to my system rather than
>going with the binary packages.  I get the impression that many
>port maintainers who are fairly careful about keeping their port
>versions workable and patched only give a relative lick and promise
>to their packages.
>   -LenZ-
>  
>

While I share your bias towards the ports tree, I think that
this final impression might be wrong<?>.  Kris Kennaway et al
have a rather extensive system for automated package-building.
built very regularly (see http://pointyhat.freebsd.org).  Of course,
they don't control the source of all those ports, so I guess it's
possible that if some maintainers have their software in a broken
or buggy state when a set of packages is built for a RELEASE,
there's not much that can be done about it at the time.  I'm sure
that maintainers are notified a few times before a RELEASE in
order to get their affairs in order, but that doesn't mean that
they do, or that it's FBSD's fault if they don't.

I guess if you knew the URI of a recently built package from
the Project's "bento cluster", (or whatever it's called), you
could use pkg_add against that address and get something
newer if you wanted to.  Me, I like ports ....

Kevin Kinsey