Regarding packages and ports, up to dateness

[Milscvaer]

Recently, I have installed FreeBSD 5.4, first I would
like to thank all those who work on for such a stable,
useable operating system. I have tried OpenBSD and
NetBSD on many of my computers, which would not boot
at all. FreeBSD is the only OS that will boot on many
of the computers we have and hopefully FreeBSD will to
work to make sure that hardware compatability is
improved and maintained. 

However, there is room for improvement. One of the
major issues I have is with the out of date binary
packages available for the latest stable release
(5.4). Yes, I know that there are much more up to data
packages in Ports, I know many people just love
spending hours of time compiling and recompiling ports
over and over agian every time they want a new version
of software X, but many of us have better ways to
spend our time and computer resources. Many of us do
not have fast enough computers to make this possible
(it would take a week). Please, please, please offer
up to date packages compiled from the latest version
of its port for the latest stable release of FreeBSD.
Perhaps you can set up a system to automatically
rebuild a binary package from its port when that
specific port as been upgraded to a new version and
put it up on the FTP sites. This would only require a
particular package to have to be rebuilt when its port
has been updated to a new version. This would save a
lot of people a lot of time. Please.

Also, I have a question, if I binary upgrade FreeBSD,
I can continue to use existing packages I have from
the previous version, right? What if a package from a
previous version and a package from a current version
of FreeBSD require the same dynamically linked library
(such as the same version of GTK). Do both packages
share the same dynamically linked library, or do the
binaries from older versions and newer versions each
require a different build of the same library? Can
dynamic libraries from previous versions of FreeBSD be
loaded into programs compiled for the latest version
of freebsd, and vice versa? If not, how does FreeBSD
handle this mess?

Thank you.



		
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