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by Wilya 4227 days ago
It's worth pointing out that since FreeBSD 10, there is a new binary package manager, "pkg", which works pretty well and makes package management much less painful.

It makes the experience in this regard not much different from any apt-get based linux distribution. The old way of having to compile everything makes your system very configurable, but it gets brittle on systems where you have to make big upgrades.
1 comments
rgbrenner 4227 days ago
Freebsd already had binary packages.. they (finally) developed a new binary package manager, which is great, but it doesn't change much.

The problem with binary packages on freebsd was that they are frozen at release. So when you use the package manager to install everything you need... then a large package has a security hole (or it already has a hole.. since the packages might be months out of date), and the only way to patch it is by using the ports.

THe only thing packages on freebsd are good for is getting up and running. You'll save a bit of time if you install the packages.. but you have to use ports to upgrade and maintain those packages.

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Mordak 4227 days ago
I don't think you are correct here - pkg upgrade most certainly pulls down updated versions of packages, complete with security patches. In fact, the default freebsd daily job will send you an email listing which packages have security vulnerabilities, so you can go update them.
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rgbrenner 4227 days ago
You are right.. I'm wrong.

I used it from 3.4-8.. nice to see that they addressed my problem with the new package manager.

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Wilya 4227 days ago
Actually, they had been generating ~weekly snapshots of built binary packages in the past, but for some reason I don't understand, they weren't used by default, and the setup to actually use them was... obscure and not really officially documented. You had to set the right environment variable to point to the remote HTTP repository.

The new pkg uses the up-to-date repository by default. It has fixed all this mess, and turned binary packages from something very clunky that nobody really used to something fairly solid that can be used in production. The only reason I use ports nowadays is when I need to set custom build options on a package.

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