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Old 27th March 2012
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by daemonfowl View Post
In what sense are {distfiles} functionally different from packages in /usr/ports ?
When building ports manually, tarballs from officially sanctioned servers are downloaded into /usr/ports/distfiles/. These files are the same downloaded for other operating systems, & may be specific to other operating systems. Packages are the result of OpenBSD's building process which may contain patches needed to get these applications to run on OpenBSD.

As an example, compare filesystem layouts between Linux & OpenBSD. OpenBSD's layout is described in hier(7). The two layouts are not the same. It is not uncommon for OpenBSD's ports to have to patch applications found in the wild because they target Linux -- Linux-specific libraries or Linux's filesystem layout.

So going back to the original question, packages are the result of building distfiles with any number of custom-made patches. Sometimes, these patches correct application behavior & are forwarded to the original project for inclusion.

Packages & distfiles are not interchangable.
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