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Old 23rd October 2009
Beastie Beastie is offline
Daemonology student
 
Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: /dev/earth0
Posts: 335
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Quote:
Originally Posted by windependence View Post
ports are much more reliable than packages
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 View Post
and it doesn't seem to me like packages are supported as well as ports
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 View Post
Most compilation errors occur when your ports collection is not updated or you are mixing old and newer ports.
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.
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