[H-GEN] package management systems.

[Sarah Walters]

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On Wed, Feb 12, 2003 at 10:39:21AM -0500, Jason Parker-Burlingham wrote:
> >  From the tone of replies Greg, you seem to have expressed a problem
> > without applying a bit of Common Sense.  Yes, most package management
> > tools do 'allow' packages to be installed from an arbitary filename, and
> > then 'insist' that you find out the proper name of the package before
> > uninstalling it.  Doing otherwise does not appear to be the 'Right Thing'
> > to do, and most (all?) package management systems seem to adhere to this.
> 
> Well, to be completely fair, I shall point out that on a Debian by
> using apt and/or dselect, one never ever needs to deal with a
> package's file name at all.  So you can certainly say
> 
>         apt-get install foo
>         apt-get remove foo
> 
> without any worries.

I switched to FreeBSD a few months ago, and this was one of the major
reasons why. I LOVE the ports system. Installing a package (as long as
you want the latest version that has been built on freebsd) works like
this (eg is cyrus-imapd2, since I did that recently).

cd /usr/ports/mail/cyrus-imapd2
make all install

It will pull down all necessary source files, including any
dependencies, off the internet, check the md5 signatures and compile the
source for you. It installs in a sensible (usually) place, and the
makefile's default settings are appropriate for any standard freebsd
install, so no need to run configure.

If you want it gone again:

make deinstall
make clean (or distclean if you want the source files gone too)

Admittedly it's not always perfect (phoenix wouldn't compile on me
yesterday, and I didn't bother to find out why since opera compiled just
fine), but I have found this a lot easier than RPMs, and I prefer to
build off source anyway. Gives me a nice warm fuzzy feeling.

FreeBSD doesn't have all the pretties that Linux has, but it's a
rock-solid server, and with Linux binary compatibility mode you can run 
RH inside it if you wish. I'm definitely a convert (tho I would probably
still turn to Linux for a standalone workstation configuration).

And don't you love that little red daemon? :)

-- 
Mrs Sarah Walters
Systems Group
Information Technology Services
University of Wollongong
Phone: +61 2 4221 3775


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