Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2011 14:33:51 +0200 From: Christian Walther <cptsalek@gmail.com> To: Jeremy Chadwick <freebsd@jdc.parodius.com> Cc: Jason Hsu <jhsu802701@jasonhsu.com>, freebsd-stable@freebsd.org, Michal Varga <varga.michal@gmail.com> Subject: Re: Best way to switch from Linux to BSD Message-ID: <AANLkTim2L3Z7XO0y-EVDqjqN%2BScji=EKRVcuLRK2yfX5@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <20110329113606.GA69065@icarus.home.lan> References: <20110329013223.ddca7453.jhsu802701@jasonhsu.com> <1301391185.71226.36.camel@xenon> <AANLkTikt8K7K%2BcY76iNjJkx_qQLCAhd=b74OKmX1w4th@mail.gmail.com> <20110329113606.GA69065@icarus.home.lan>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Hello Jeremy, On 29 March 2011 13:36, Jeremy Chadwick <freebsd@jdc.parodius.com> wrote: > On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 12:59:24PM +0200, Christian Walther wrote: [ZSH PCRE Support] Up to now I probably had to need for pcre, since I haven't noticed that it's not part of the package. ;) And in case of an emergency I stick to /sbin/sh. :) But I got your point: It does make sense to install from ports when you want a configuration that's different to the port default. >> And I reckon it's rather difficult to setup a system without having >> python and ruby installed. > > Up until recent Apache 2.2.x releases, absolutely none of our systems > had Python installed (I'm still sore about that and would love to know > why it's suddenly needed). =A0And absolutely none of them have Ruby. =A0T= he > setup of these systems is far from difficult, and all systems are built > from ports/source too (sans 2 packages, see below). Are we talking about desktops or servers? ;) Of course the ports that end up on a system are related to the choices that are being made in the first place. I think that the existence of Ruby on my laptop is due to the fact that I installed portupgrade, which can be easily avoided by using portmaster. On the other hand I'm pretty sure that I have at least one other package installed that relies on Ruby. Maybe those two are bad examples because they are fairly wide spread programming languages anyway, and as a user I want an app to perform specific tasks. IMO Python nearly can't be avoided unless you avoid some widespread applications, such as Gpodder and Gimp. But downloading a pre built package saves me lots of time... :) >> [talk about bloat, and how it's avoidable with packages] > > This is not always the case. =A0/etc/make.conf on our systems have lots o= f > WITHOUT_xxx=3Dtrue entries, solely to diminish the amount of bloat by > removing unneeded features from ports/third-party software. =A0Using a > package would pull in lots of dependencies -- the worst of which by far > is anything that pulls in X-related things -- which I don't want to deal > with. Agreed, especially on servers. For my own, very personal workload it's something different: I need to administer it in my spare time, which happens to be exactly the time I want to use it for other purposes. And compiling a port "in the background" slows down my machine, partly because I'm kind of paranoid and use geli. Dealing with dependencies is an awkward business IMO, especially when it comes to GUI based apps from the Gnome or KDE ecosystems. There are several ports that are listed as Gtk- or Qt-based, instead of Gnome or KDE, but somewhere have a dependency on Gnome or KDE base packages. And eventually you'll end up having at least half of Gnome or KDE on your harddisk anyway. One of my favorite examples is (lib)smbclient: I don't use smb anywhere and I don't want to have it on my system. Disabling it where ever possible doesn't help much, because some ports rely on libsmbclient during runtime. libgnome-vfs is another example and I guess there was a port that requires libgnome-vfs to be compiled with libsmbclient support. Oh yes, and there's dbus. And hal. So in the end I decided that the time required to tweak the port configuration is not worth the effort. Which is not the fault of the ports system. My take is that nowadays the number of dependencies increase. A normal IDE user probably won't notice because he either has the dependencies installed, or just doesn't care. > The only packages we use are 1) perl and 2) python26, and that's because > the defaults there are decent/work great for us. I use ports on my home server, which is a quad core amd64. It's just fun watching a compile, but it only takes minutes to build what I consider my base packages (zsh, vim, screen/tmux). ;) Regards Christian
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?AANLkTim2L3Z7XO0y-EVDqjqN%2BScji=EKRVcuLRK2yfX5>