What's so compelling about FreeBSD?

[Garrett Cooper]

Jim Stapleton wrote:
>> yeah the ports make me fell in love with FreeBSD, the only thing that 
>> came
>> close to FreeBSD  ports is the gentoo portage,  note came close but not
>> really at par.
>>
>
> yeah, portage wasn't bad, but it wasn't as clean as ports either. More
> errors, more fixing.
That's primarily because Gentoo is about the most bleeding edge you can 
get in the opensource OS 'market'. FBSD ports tend to be more tested and 
lag behind Gentoo portage quite a bit or do not offer some software 
packages that are available in FBSD.

Also, I'm not sure when you guys tried Gentoo, but as of late (within 
the past ~1 year), the quality of the packages and system as an OS has 
improved quite a bit, in the sense that many stable items now install 
and work properly in the OS. Another off-topic comment I admit, but I 
thought it should be mentioned...

I'd like to see portage in FBSD though, since ruby is pretty kludgy. 
Either that or a different means of recording package data and 
dependencies (been thinking of Perl for a while..).

-Garrett