What does it mean to use ports?

[hw]

Matthias Apitz <guru at unixarea.de> writes:

> El día domingo, julio 21, 2019 a las 11:09:48a. m. -0700, George Hartzell escribió:
>
>> hw writes:
>>  > Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> writes:
>>  > [...]
>>  > 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. [...]
>>  >
>>  > 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.
>> 
>> All of that is true, but awfully pessimistic.  Often things just work.
>> Other times you have to run down one or two chains of x begets y
>> begets z.
>> 
>> I think that learning to build your own things is a good exercise,
>> even if you switch back to pre-built packages.
>
> I compile my own set of the ports I'm used to use with poudriere(8).
> Based on a list of some 400 ports the result is some 2000 packages ready
> to install. Very seldom, I tweak the options of some port (for example
> to add features to mail/mutt, or to add features to x11/xterm) and there are
> never conflicts among of the options.

Hm, is there something in place that prevents messing up things through
options, or is everything ok because you almost never change them?