Quote:
Originally Posted by ephemera
I think Robbak describes it best: "Debian without the Linux".
Maybe. But are the packages updated/maintained (including security fixes) after a fbsd release is out? Are there packages for all ports?
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Yes, and no.
Packages are created when a release is made, and that release ships with all the different environment variables used by the pkg_* tools set for that specific release. Major app upgrades (KDE, Apache, GNOME, etc) will usually get updated packages built. Major security issues in more common apps will usually get updated packages built.
However, the package building cluster almost continuously builds packages for the -STABLE branches. IOW, if you manually set the environment variables to point to the 6-stable, 7-stable, or 8-stable directories on the FTP servers, then you will get (mostly) up-to-date packages. It's best to do this only when running the very latest release in each branch, so that the differences between your release and -STABLE are minimised.
There are even tools available to update installed apps using nothing but packages. portupgrade requires the ports tree to be installed, but the pkg_upgrade tool in bsdadminscripts works even without the ports tree installed.
So, yes, it is possible to have a binary-packages-only, up-to-date FreeBSD system. But, no, it's not done like that by default.
Forgot to mention, see the ports(7) man page for details on setting the PKG* environment variables.