Why Are You NOT Using FreeBSD ?

[Fritz Wuehler]

You wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 01, 2012 at 05:20:39PM +0200, Nomen Nescio wrote:
> > Maybe FreeBSD should consider migrating to pkgsrc?
> 
> I'm not arguing that your other points are invalid (in particular,
> I agree that the xorg change was really painful, and for a long time
> amd64 lagged i386 badly), but there is one very major blocker for this
> particular idea.  If you browse the following URL:
> 
>   http://wiki.freebsd.org/PackageSystemsComparison
> 
> You'll see that pkgsrc is around 12k packages.  Although our graph
> is stale, per the portsmon/FreshPorts URLs, we're approaching 24k
> ports.
> 
> So: while it's been suggested before, it's not really workable.

I am not in a position to know, but it seems to me the number of ports at
some point isn't that big of a deal vs. how well the ports build, and on how
many architectures they're available. First, is it possible to automate the
conversion of ports to pkgsrc? If not, how much of it could be automated?
How many of those 24,000 ports are actively maintained and build correctly?
If they're all active and work then yeah I think everyone would agree it
would take a lot of convincing to get those maintainers to switch to another
system, but does anyone know how many of those guys aren't *already*
maintaining pkgsrc packages for the same app? Often one maintainer does
packaging for multiple BSD and/or Linux distros. So there could be lots of
overlap and just looking at the two numbers you posted doesn't really tell
the whole story.