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Old 30th October 2013
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jggimi jggimi is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: USA
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Snapshot packages are made available to -current users for convenience, only. They may or may not be usable with either a snapshot or with a built-from-source -current.

Synchronicity with snapshot packages cannot be assured, and the impact of an out-of-sync environment is described in FAQ 15.4.1. However, snapshot packages are truly convenient. Building from ports takes time and resources.

Sometimes they are sufficiently out-of-sync that they will not install. At other times, they may install but present problems.

Some more level setting about -current:
  • The -current branch is a constantly evolving environment. Changes are committed every day, around the clock. (You can subscribe to source-changes@ and ports-changes@ to watch this happen.)
  • When you install (or upgrade) to the most recent snapshot, it is already history, as more changes to -current have already been committed. A "fresh" snapshot is already stale.
  • If you upgrade beyond the most recent snapshot from source, per FAQ 5, the same is true though to a lesser extent. The anonCVS mirrors or CVSync mirrors are refreshed in intervals no more frequently than every two hours, and your working directory tree that you use for building will be a point-in-time extraction from one of these mirrors.
  • Synchronizing a package typically requires the admin to build from ports. This often means the admin also must build one or more of the port's dependencies. The type of error presented will indicate the extent of build required. (e.g.: an installation failure due to a "bad major" library version usually will only require a rebuild of the underlying library, if that underlying library is third party (/usr/local/lib) and not part of the base OS (/usr/lib).
If you want to build xombrero from source, you can certainly do so. You could also build all of its run dependencies from source as well. But there are no guarantees -- that may or may not eliminate your problems with the application.
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