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Old 3rd January 2009
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lvlamb View Post
OpenBSD apps *always* are installed from packages.
Not to belabor discussion, but lvlamb raises a point that most tend to forget; building from ports simply creates the same packages which can be found on the various mirrors. The final step in building a port simply installs whatever package(s) were generated. This is a primary reason for advocating that existing packages be installed instead of recreating them anew.
Quote:
Originally Posted by boder
it seems to me that during the compilation process a more customized profile is made for your machine and the packages on it and therefore that would make it stable, anyone know what's wrong with this?
What you are seeing is a cultural difference between projects. If I can (over)-generalize the Gentoo philosophy, it is to expose as many knobs as possible such that users have as many choices as they might want to in constructing their systems. This mindset isn't shared by the OpenBSD project for a number of reasons:
  • As part of the catchphrase used by the project (free, functional, & secure...), effort is put into verifying that code paths are legitimate. By exposing lots of knobs, an exponential number of paths would have to be verified. The OpenBSD project is small, & putting time into such work is not deemed a priority, so exposing lots of variations in code paths isn't deemed important either.
  • Not that this is meant to imply that customization cannot be done, as makefiles can be individually modified, but the project itself doesn't have the bandwidth to deal with every possible variation imaginable. People are free to make whatever changes they wish, but the project's responsibility ends at the point of customization.
  • This is also not meant to imply that the OpenBSD project is diametrically opposed to customization. There are times where it is necessary for grounded reasons. The two projects are simply different. They have different goals, so the line is drawn at different locations for cultural reasons.
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