Best way to switch from Linux to BSD

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 12:59:24PM +0200, Christian Walther wrote:
> What's the benefit of building everything from source? Yes, you can
> configure some of the ports, but in these days you'll end up with
> stuff you don't want to have anyway. I'm a zsh user and have hardly
> any need for bash, except that there are ports that have it as run
> and/or build dependency.

Apologies if I'm missing something here, but:

What if you're a zsh user who wants PCRE support, or a statically-linked
shell (for cases of emergency)?  You get to rebuild from source, as the
package only provides what the defaults are (ZFS_PCRE=off).  So, the
package wouldn't suffice:

# cd /usr/ports/shells/zsh
# make showconfig
===> The following configuration options are available for zsh-4.3.11:
     ZSH_GDBM=off (default) "Enable GDBM support (GPL)"
     ZSH_MEM=on (default) "Enable zsh-mem and zsh-secure-free options"
     ZSH_MAILDIR=on (default) "Enable support for Maildirs in MAIL(PATH)"
     ZSH_MULTIBYTE=on (default) "Enable multibyte character support"
     ZSH_PCRE=off (default) "Enable PCRE support"
     ZSH_STATIC=off (default) "Build static executable"
===> Use 'make config' to modify these settings

> And I reckon it's rather difficult to setup a system without having
> python and ruby installed.

Up until recent Apache 2.2.x releases, absolutely none of our systems
had Python installed (I'm still sore about that and would love to know
why it's suddenly needed).  And absolutely none of them have Ruby.  The
setup of these systems is far from difficult, and all systems are built
from ports/source too (sans 2 packages, see below).

> Besides: I think it's one of FreeBSDs strength that you can decide not
> only on how to use it, but on how to install it. You have the choice
> to install FreeBSD and compile from ports, install FreeBSD and use
> packages, or use PC-BSD with a juicy graphical installer.

Agreed.

> [talk about bloat, and how it's avoidable with packages]

This is not always the case.  /etc/make.conf on our systems have lots of
WITHOUT_xxx=true entries, solely to diminish the amount of bloat by
removing unneeded features from ports/third-party software.  Using a
package would pull in lots of dependencies -- the worst of which by far
is anything that pulls in X-related things -- which I don't want to deal
with.

The only packages we use are 1) perl and 2) python26, and that's because
the defaults there are decent/work great for us.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.               PGP 4BD6C0CB |