FreeBSD Ports vs. Gentoo Portage (a matter of concept)

[Hans Nieser]

FreeBSD Prospect wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Reading a lot about FreeBSD recently made me really curious. I know, that the 
> founder of Gentoo (the well known GNU/Linux meta-distribution, which is also 
> based on compiling everything from source) was using FreeBSD for some time, 
> before continuing creating Gentoo, what's why portage (the Gentoo software 
> management system) is generally based on FreeBSD's ports. 

[.. comparison of ports/portage features ..]

I've been running Gentoo on my desktop computer for a few months and 
FreeBSD on my laptop / server machines. What I am especially fond of in 
portage is the USE-flags and the way you can specify then globally and 
individually for each package and how you can get a nice, short overview 
of which USE-flags a package uses and which of them are enabled with 
"emerge -pv port". And also how you can find their descriptions without 
having to dig through Makefiles (although that's becoming less 
intimidating for me now that I have been using FreeBSD for half a year or so).

FreeBSD-ports' config mechanism isn't too bad but not all ports seem to 
support these. I also remember an instance where I did a config-recursive 
before installing Gnome and I was still presented with one or two config 
menus.