Quote:
Originally Posted by windependence
ports are much more reliable than packages
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What do you mean? Packages are built *from ports* using a default, "works-on-most-systems" configuration, a bit like the GENERIC kernel.
I guess they're both as reliable.
Quote:
Originally Posted by windependence
and it doesn't seem to me like packages are supported as well as ports
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Ports are maintained and packages are routinely built from them. The only difference is that it takes some time for packages to be available. But if you use a STABLE package repository, you'd have to wait around 2 weeks at most.
Of course, even that could be totally unacceptable on secured production systems that need up-to-date, fully patched, software. Ports would be more appropriate in that case.
Quote:
Originally Posted by windependence
Most compilation errors occur when your ports collection is not updated or you are mixing old and newer ports.
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It's exactly the same with packages and their dependencies. But instead of build-time errors, you have run-time errors: random crashes, inability to start, error messages on ttys, etc.
So to fix this, you'd just do a pkg_delete -a, say, every 6 months and reinstall everything from scratch. With the port system, you basically do exactly the same thing. You fetch the source for the port and all its build/run-time dependencies again and rebuild the whole hierarchy.