FreeBSD & Linux distro

[Heiko Wundram (Beenic)]

Am Donnerstag, 21. Februar 2008 15:58:51 schrieb James Harrison:
> > > 8. Most extensive collection of third party software (over 18000 ) only
> > > second to Debian.
> >
> > Looking back at it, I'm surprised I didn't mention that.
>
> Gentoo has over 24 thousand ebuilds, where an ebuild is their equivalent
> of a port:

Err, don't confuse ebuilds with packages. A package is a piece of software 
(which is the equivalent of a port), whereas an ebuild is an install script 
for a specific version of a package. Normally, there's more than one version 
of a package (more than one ebuild) available for a package, which makes the 
ebuild count higher than the FreeBSD ports count, but the package count lower 
(somewhere above 12000).

This doesn't count slotted ebuilds: for example, Gentoo has just one gtk 
package, which contains several ebuilds for slot 12 which is gtk-1.2.x and 
several ebuilds for slot 20, which is gtk-2.x (different slots are treated as 
different packages by the system internally), whereas FreeBSD has a gtk12 and 
a gtk20 port, which installs the respective versions.

So, basically whatever numbers you take, they can't be compared directly 
anyway, but I guess that the number of ports is still higher than the Gentoo 
amortized package count would be.

-- 
Heiko Wundram
Product & Application Development