What does it mean to use ports?

[hw]

Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> writes:

> On Mon, 15 Jul 2019 17:34:40 +0200, hw wrote:
>> George Hartzell <hartzell at alerce.com> writes:
>> > [...]
>> >
>> > The third hand (gripping hand, for you Pohl fans) is to build all of
>> > your things offline using poudriere/synth and then manage them with
>> > the pkg tools.  It works best when you know what you want, and/or can
>> > be patient when you decide you want new things.
>> 
>> Thanks!  Somehow I thought this would be a lot easier --- and of course,
>> it isn't.  For now, I'll stick with the binary packages until there's
>> good reason not to.  Anything else is too time consuming because there
>> is so much that I need to figure out first.
>
> Once you have setup your build environment, you can automate
> a lot of things. But as you have seen, this requires some work
> upfront. However, if you need a lot of custom-built software,
> poudriere or synth are very convenient tools, and in the end,
> you can use pkg to interface with their results.

The most time consuming part would be to learn and to decide about all
the options of all the packages to compile.  Doing that for just one
package like emacs might take weeks because there are so many
dependencies.  And there's no end to it because one option I might like
to disable or to enable for emacs might lead to some option of some
library becoming questionable, and when I change that, all the other
software using that library could require its options to be changed, and
it goes on like that.

At some point in the process, it might not work out at all because I
picked options in contradiction to dependencies.  Setting up the tools
might be the smallest problem.