What does it mean to use ports?

[hw]

George Hartzell <hartzell at alerce.com> writes:

> 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.

hmm, maybe

> Other times you have to run down one or two chains of x begets y
> begets z.

Well, I've seen Gentoo becoming entirely impossible to update like this
because z would then beget x.  You had to update emerge before something
required to update emerge could be updated, and emerge was unable to
update that before it itself had been updated.

I'm not so pessimistic as to ever dream or even expect anything like
that, but it did happen and I had to deprecate Gentoo because of it.

> I think that learning to build your own things is a good exercise,
> even if you switch back to pre-built packages.

right

Yet I don't see myself using FreeBSD much.  It won't work with the
hardware, isn't too great with virtualization as a host, and I'm not
familiar with it.  I might have a single use case in a VM, and I'm still
undecided whether there's enough to gain from creating an isolated
incident or not to be worth it.