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Date:      17 Feb 1998 08:35:34 -0600
From:      stephen farrell <stephen@farrell.org>
To:        John Goerzen <jgoerzen@alexanderwohl.complete.org>
Cc:        stephen farrell <stephen@farrell.org>, John Kenagy <jktheowl@bga.com>, Vincent Defert <vdefert@trace.fr>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD vs Linux
Message-ID:  <87yazapadl.fsf@phaedrus.uchicago.edu>
In-Reply-To: John Goerzen's message of "Mon, 16 Feb 1998 18:49:08 %2B0000 (GMT)"
References:  <Pine.LNX.3.96.980216184712.524C-100000@alexanderwohl.cs.twsu.edu>

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John Goerzen <jgoerzen@alexanderwohl.complete.org> writes:

> On 15 Feb 1998, stephen farrell wrote:
> 
> > John Goerzen <jgoerzen@alexanderwohl.complete.org> writes:
> > 
> > > minor.  IMHO, the only exception to this is Debian's package management
> > > system, which is far superior to FreeBSD's.  However, there's nothing
> > 
> > ???? What the freak are you talking about?  Even debian advocates HATE 
> > it's package management system.  If you switch that sentence to read:
> 
> Stephen,
> 
> As somebody that routinely monitors both Linux and FreeBSD mailing lists,
> you are quite incorrect. 

Well, I have had nothing but pain using dselect, and nothing but
pleasure using ports.  And I KNOW that I am not alone.  I was involved 
in a long thread about this a few months ago, and there were plenty of 
debian people who agreed that dselect was awful.  if you really care,
look it up on dejanews.

I agree that freebsd binary packages are not always up-to-date, and
this is bad.  But ports is wonderful and extremely well maintained;
much more than debian packages, and with cron and cvsup, I can find
every package I ever want on my own disk and compile and install it
with zero trouble. (I'm not sure why they don't have a cronjob running 
at fbsd to build packages of all of the ports...)

I had a friend trying to install KDE beta 3 on a debian box.  It was
too much of a pain so he stopped--first you needed to track down all
of the various packages it depends upon, install these, then run play
wiht dpkg trying to guess which of the debian packages to install
first.  EVEN THOUGH THE PACKAGE IT NEEDED WAS IN THE CWD, DPKG DOESN'T
FIND IT.  So he just didn't bother.

under freebsd (and do I need to remind you that kde is not officially
supported under freebsd), I do

cd /usr/ports/x11/kde

make all install
<wait a while>

and I'm done.

Here's another example.  Install the latest GIMP under debian linux
vs. under freebsd.

w/freebsd:

cd /usr/ports/graphics/gimp-devel
make all install



--

Steve Farrell


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