Re: Dragonflybsd Presentation

[Michel Talon <talon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Matthew Dillon wrote:
>     We would, but it would not be generally used by users.  Source builds are
>     fine but they tend to fail for odd reasons far more then binary installs.
>     We want to be able to deal with breakage on the build side of things 
>     without inconveniencing the user base.

And conversely. Recently i have installed a very large number of 
packages from FreeBSD-5.3 RELEASE. I have installed binary packages as 
far as possible, but a fair number were unavailable, because Kris
could not build them or whatever. I was very happy to build them from 
source and succeeded to solve the problems, either by commenting some
offending requirements in the Makefile, or by some simple tweaks.
This shows at least that a number of ports in FreeBSD have an 
unreasonably large number of dependencies, which multiplies the
occasions of failure. Frequently you can very easily remove some of the 
dependencies and get as good a soft at the end. Also there are ports
that are forbidden to redistribute in binary form, like Java, or
recommended to recompile on ones machine like mplayer. Hence keeping
a source ports tree handy is very useful. In my own, certainly flawed 
experience, predominantly binary distributions like Debian sometimes 
cause a lot of grief. Of course large availability of binary packages is 
very useful.



--
Michel Talon