new package system proposal

[Jonathan McKeown]

On Wednesday 08 April 2009 21:24:00 Bob Johnson wrote:
> PC-BSD seems to already keep up-to-date binary packages of their
> applications. Do they accomplish that by only offering a small subset
> of the full ports collection?

Yes - have a look at <http://www.pbidir.com/>. I installed PC-BSD on a spare 
machine to investigate it. The first three ports/metaports I tried to install 
after completing the base setup were emacs, TeTeX and the Psi Jabber/XMPP 
client. None of those was available, and after seeing how few prebuilt 
packages there were in all categories, I gave up.

My personal view is that PC-BSD gives the end user an impressive and 
reasonably slick computer-as-appliance with some ability to customise and 
still stay ``on the path''. For people who need that, PC-BSD is what they 
need. My feeling, though, is that anyone who finds themselves wanting to 
install a bunch of stuff from outside the PBI system (in other words, from 
ports, which are still there under the hood of PC-BSD) will soon want to 
switch to mainstream FreeBSD. As such PC-BSD has the potential to be an 
effective ``gateway drug''(!)

Jonathan