Pain finding packages

[Tim Judd]

On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 11:48 AM, Joe Springer <joespr at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hi.
>
> I am very new to FreeBSD with several years of Linux experience. After
> installed FreeSDB for the first time, I wanted to install some packages. For
> example, samba.
>
> I found that
>
>   pkg_add -r samba
>
> fails. I need to know specifically the samba version to install it.
>
> To install, I needed do this:
>   pkg_add -r samba3
>
> This is difficult. Do I need to look up every package in advance on your
> website to understand what version I need to install?
>
> Isn't there a way to specify "Install the latest version of some package
> that is appropriate to the version of my installed FreeBSD"?
>
> Thanks,
> Joe
>
>
Since the ports tree (for which packages are made from) can house multiple
versions of a software package (samba 3.0, 3.2 and 3.3 IIRC), specifying
"samba" alone sometimes work for the default, and sometimes it's "samba32"
or similar.  It's up to the port maintainer to name it and what the
resulting package name will be.  Like most distributions, a search online
can yield the version you want.  Go to http://ports.freebsd.org and query
any part of a substring to search for.



--TJ