FreeBSD & Linux distro

[Drew Tomlinson]

Heiko Wundram (Beenic) wrote:
> 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.
>   

And also be aware that many utilities included in the FreeBSD base 
system are ebuilds in the Gentoo world.  tcpdump and top are just two 
examples I can think of off the top of my head.

Cheers,

Drew