Getting started with FreeBSD

[cothrige]

* Tore Lund (toreld at netscape.net) wrote:
> 
> I wondered about the same thing some time ago.  I was told by one of the
> gurus to try packages-6-stable, which would most likely work with
> 6.1-RELEASE.  So I tried to fetch the latest Firefox in this way:
> 
> pkg_add [no line break]
> ftp://ftp.<mirror>.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-6-stable/www/firefox-1.5.0.7,1.tbz
> 

Doesn't this seem a tad clunky and unfinished?  I am still having a
bit of trouble figuring out what I am overlooking.  Why would a fully
binary installed OS offer no binary support for updates at all?  Why
have a nice secure RELEASE edition when once installed it will
naturally develop security holes that are very hard to find and fix?
Things are just so foggy at this point and I must assume that I am
just not seeing the answer to this.

> Seems to work fine.  However, I tried to do the same thing with
> Thunderbird (mail/thunderbird-1.5.0.7.tbz), and then I got many warnings
> about libraries not being up to date.  Could I have done it differently
> to get dependencies updated as well?
> 
> Just a few extra words in section 4.4.1 the handbook could probably have
> cleared this up.

One of the things I don't get is the stable vs. release concept.
There is basically nothing said to address this.  I can imagine that
the packages in packages-6.1-release are fixed and static, though it
surprises me that no security fixes are placed there, but what about
packages-6-stable?  These seem quite new, comparitively, and so I
would assume that they are not static as release are.  And if they are
in fact tracked and improved, how can they be accessed via the tools?
Your experience seems to show that using them in a release system is
not ideal, and so must be unintended.  It really is about as clear as
mud to me.  And as fine as the handbook is I cannot really use the
info given there without a better understanding of the basic system
concepts such as this first.

Patrick