FreeBSD hacker 101

[Mohacsi Janos]

On Sun, 27 Jan 2008, Mike Meyer wrote:

> On Sat, 26 Jan 2008 15:55:53 -0800 (PST) KAYVEN  RIESE <kayve at sfsu.edu> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, 26 Jan 2008, Mike Meyer wrote:
>>> On Sat, 26 Jan 2008 12:24:36 -0800 (PST) KAYVEN  RIESE <kayve at sfsu.edu> wrote:
>>>> On Sat, 26 Jan 2008, Dag-Erling Sm˙˙rgrav wrote:
>>>>> KAYVEN  RIESE <kayve at sfsu.edu> writes:
>>> .rpm is a package format, and comes with a tool set for using it. Most
>>> (all?) GNU/Linux systems come with tools for dealing with it, but they
>>> all also come with tools for dealing with .tgz. Some GNU/Linux distros
>>> use .rpm to distribute their software, but not all do. I don't think
>>> any Unix systems have adopted it; most of them have packaging systems
>>> that predate .rpm, and they're all different. Different package
>>> formats for vendor software isn't a GNU/Linux vs. FreeBSD or Unix
>>> thing, it's a fact of line in a multi-platform Unix environment.
>> my reason for bringing the whole thing up was based on the idea
>> that this person might be used to using *.rpm all the time
>
> Well, maybe. But consider the context: they're looking at moving from
> GNU/Linux to FreeBSD, so they're probably familiar with more than one
> GNU/Linux distro, so there's a good chance they'ev seen more than just
> rpms for system software distribution. Further, they're looking at
> working on the FreeBSD code base, so they're a programmer, so there's
> a good chance they've gone to the source sites for the packages
> included in those distros, where they almost certainly would have
> noticed that the binaries for other platforms weren't in rpms. Since
> they're programmers, they've probably downloaded source distributions,
> which are almost invariable tarballs of some sort or another.
>
> In other words, the chances that they've only seen rpm file
> distributions would seem to be vanishingly small, so there are things
> that are far more likely to disrupt them - like the difference in
> which system calls will work properly between fork() and exec() that
> Posix() doesn't require to do so - that are still so unlikely to do so
> to be worth mentioning in this context.
>
> If you feel you have to mention it, then you should really talk about
> the tools, not the formats: GNU/Linux distros tend to use rpm* or apt*
> tools for installing and managing software packages, whereas FreeBSD
> uses the pkg* tools.


Not necessary to use pkg* tools on FreeBSD. You can use pkgsrc

http://www.pkgsrc.org/

or openpkg

http://www.openpkg.org/

All above are supported on multi-os environment.

Regards,

Janos Mohacsi
Network Engineer, Research Associate, Head of Network Planning and Projects
NIIF/HUNGARNET, HUNGARY
Key 70EF9882: DEC2 C685 1ED4 C95A 145F  4300 6F64 7B00 70EF 9882