Date: Mon, 02 Aug 1999 18:58:47 -0500 From: David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net> To: Thomas David Rivers <rivers@dignus.com> Cc: bitter@noah.org, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Need comparative data Message-ID: <199908022358.SAA60759@nospam.hiwaay.net> In-Reply-To: Message from Thomas David Rivers <rivers@dignus.com> of "Mon, 02 Aug 1999 06:49:38 EDT." <199908021049.GAA03841@lakes.dignus.com>
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Thomas David Rivers writes: > > > > As far as administration and support goes I think it's clear that Linux > > has a big advantage. Many packages (like Apache and Squid) come prebuilt > > in RPM format. Also Linux seems to have good Java support. > > Those same packages come pre-built on FreeBSD as well. Many believe > our `ports/packages' mechanism is much better than the RPM approach. > > All you need to do is download the package and say `package_add'. Its "pkg_add", not "package_add". And you don't have to download the package first. If you know the url just list it on the command line. > With the `ports' system, all you do is download the port, which is > typically a makefile along with any patches needed to compile the > item on FreeBSD. Then, run `make'. The makefile will fetch > the original distribution, apply the patches, and build the product. And that is even better than a prebuilt binary as it gives you the sources pre-patched for FreeBSD use in case you want a custom version slightly different than the distribution. Simply type "make patch", do your thing, then "make install" to finish it off. I mention this because there are some parameters in Apache that have to be compiled in. I don't know if Linux has anything like CTM or cvsup (yet) for keeping distributed source trees in sync. With CTM you can have the very latest diffs delivered to you via email within hours. Its pretty easy to automatically file away the incoming CTM's, and even automatically apply them to your source tree(s). I prefer to file them away automatically (not in my email client) but manually apply them. Rather than subscribe to the source version of CTM or cvsup you could get the diffs of the master CVS repository. Using your own CVS repository you can track changes to FreeBSD. You can recreate any version of FreeBSD since 2.0. You can mix components between -stable and -current if you wish. When I was trying to do useful work with Linux when asking for help one alway recited something like, "RedHat 5.2, kernel 2.0.2, Joe's patches vers 0.32, Alan's patches 1.002" as it was a mess with all the seemingly essential kernel patches floating around. One final thing about Linux, you can't write a file larger than 2G unless you want to sort thru all the different patches which hack ext2fs into supporting files larger than 2G. But then how do you handle lseek() and family? :-( -- David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@nospam.hiwaay.net ===================================================================== The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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