FreeBSD Ports Collection Reaches 7000

An Anonymous Coward writes: "The FreeBSD ports collection has just had the 7000th port committed. The original message can be read in Kris Kennaway's post to freebsd-ports."

Giving Debian a run for its money

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian is currently around 9,500 and has the most ports of any Linux distribution.

FreeBSD is catching up fast. Hopefully soon we'll have two spectacularly complete UNIX distributions to choose from!

Re:Giving Debian a run for its money

[__past__]

Debian is currently around 9,500 and has the most ports of any Linux distribution.

Yeah, but we all know [slashdot.org] how they managed that...

Re:Giving Debian a run for its money

[Clue4All]

True, but that number is over-inflated. Debian counts ports for different parts of the same package, such as openssl, libopenssl, and libopenssl-devel for OpenSSL. These are all one OpenSSL port in FreeBSD, as it is with any library. I'd be surprised if Debian had a number close to equal to FreeBSD's ports if they were counted the same way.

Less than 3% GNU software? (offtopic)

[timothy]

Dear Clue4All:

Curious about your sig, and where your figure of less than 3% comes from. Do you have a program which actually sorts / categorizes the software on your machine by license? That sounds like an interesting statistic, I wonder what various populations's result curves would look like in that case ...

timothy

Re:Less than 3% GNU software? (offtopic)

[Clue4All]

The 3% is an approximation based on disk space usage of my distribution's components. It's not precise and is little more than my opinion on what I think of people who shout about how it should be called GNU/Linux when I have things that I find much more essential than GNU software taking up more space on my system (and now's definitely not the time to debate it, for anyone else that's reading). Sorry, I don't have anything that interesting besides counting up the disk space of GNU packages, though it would be an interesting thing to find out the statistics on.

Re:Giving Debian a run for its money

[Arandir]

I noticed that too about Debian. The "atomicity" of the packages under Debian is far lower than that under FreeBSD. One port in FreeBSD might equate to up to four packages on Debian.

It's silly to claim that one or the other has the most packages. I'll still root for FreeBSD though...

Re:Giving Debian a run for its money

[essdodson]

Soon? FreeBSD is already rock solid. I've never had it fail me. I suggest you give it another chance if this is based on an opinion of past experiences. The new release engineering is incredible, its much more open that it was a few years ago and as such much more bugs gets squished during the release process.

Just in time

[__past__]

... given there is a freeze for the ports tree scheduled friday, due to the upcoming 4.6 release.

Imagine how many it could be if it wouldn't take so darn long until ports made by non-commiters make it in CVS. There are a lot of open "New Port:" pr's in GNATS, and I strongly doubt that they are all problematic in any way, problably nobody found the time to look at them in most cases. This is quite annoying, if you created a port and it sits there uncommited for months.

However, congrats to all porters! Keep on the good work.

Re:Just in time

[bpalmer]

I seriously doubt that. Mine (PR37729) is 24 days old and hasn't been touched yet.

Re:Just in time

[Arandir]

Do what I do: "Dear Mr. Committer, I noticed that my port has been languishing in GNATS for a month now. Is there a problem with this port? Is it failing to build? Is it breaking hier(7)? Please let me know so I can fix it."

I get the response: "Nothing's wrong with it, we're just backlogged. Here, I'll commit it right now... Thanks for your patience."

(of course, right before the 4.6 freeze, they REALLY are backlogged)

Re:7000 ports == lots of unportable software

[someonehasmyname]

okay, first I'll explain how ports work... then I'll tell show you that your numbers are wrong.

to download new ports you use cvs. they're broken down into categories. www, ftp, sysutils, audio, etc. when you run your cvs script, it will always download files called: Makefile, distinfo, pkg-comment, pkg-descr, and pkg-plist. Occasionally it will create a "files" directory and include patches. It always downloads the patches, because they're generally small anyways.

Just to have exact figures I downloaded all of the ports while writing this (I usually don't download ports having to do with japanese, chinese, etc.)

Here's what I found:

/usr/ports# find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -ls
returns 54 directories, one is "." and four don't count. (they're used by FreeBSD)

/usr/ports# find . -type d -maxdepth 2 | wc -l
returns 7111 results. Now we need to subtract the 55 "."'s and all of those "."'s have a "." of their own.

7111 results, minus 110 = 7001 total ports.

/usr/ports# du -h
returns 266 megs.

266 megs / 7001 ports = 0.038 megs per port.

Re:7000 ports == lots of unportable software

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

maybe...

find /usr/ports -type d -maxdepth 2 ! -name '.' ! -name '..' | wc -l

still have to remove BSD special ones from this

Re:7000 ports == lots of unportable software

[kkenn]

The way I counted them was by building a new INDEX file (one entry per port) and then running wc -l on it :-)

Re:7000 ports == lots of unportable software

[Bishop]

I suspect you are trolling. but...

Two many people know how to write code, but don't know how to develope code. A symptom of this problem is that you get code that was written on a Linux platform, but was not written or designed for a Unix platform. So yes there is lots of unportable code.

The need for a ports system would exist regardless of the "quality of free software." Perfectly portable code will always require some patching to configure the software for the target OS. Even if all the patch does is move the location of the documents from /usr/share/doc to /usr/doc. Until every distro, and every Unix-like OS is identical this will be the case.

gak! minor correction

[Bishop]

damn, even after a preview:

s/Two/Too/

Re:port == source or binary package ?

[someonehasmyname]

a port is the source, with freebsd specific diffs, that gets patched and then compiled.

Re:port == source or binary package ?

[mrowlands]

and a package is the binary version....so you can
do:

make package

which will compile and install the port (from source) and also create a binary package you can then add to your other machines.....Hoo Har!

Re:This story is pointless and stupid

[Daeron]

It's news for the exact same reason that the release of Linux-development kernel gazillion-and-one is slashdot Frontpage News.

Is there a collection of sources packages

[Krapangor]

usable with the ports system out there ?
If you are at a slow internet connection you cannot afford to download all the sources.
I think this is the main flaw of the ports system and the reason why *BSD is not used of stand alone desktops very often.
Yes, I know that there are binary packages out there now.

BTW: a search in the posts package for "bsd is dying" returns "Sorry, nothing found. You may look for other FreeBSD Search Services."
It seems that there is still much to do for them.

Re:Is there a collection of sources packages

[marcovje]

cd /usr/src
make fetch

and have one of your friends burn it, or buy/copy the disc set.

(note it probably wiser to simply select the ports
you need, put a make fetch for that port in a script... and have a friend run the script)

Re:Is there a collection of sources packages

[essdodson]

I'm sure exactly what you're asking. It looks like you're contradicting yourself. Are you asking for sources? Ports are nothing but a patchset with automated compilation procedures to grab the sources, build and install.

Are you looking for binary packages? pkg_add -r mozilla or whatever you're looking for. The majority of the packages users want are available on the ISO for install as well.

Rather than telling us about your mensa membership, why not show us through a stroke of pure brilliance.

Re:Is there a collection of sources packages

[biglig2]

He doesn't say he is a member of Mensa, just that he owns a membership card. ;-)

Ina similar way, just because CowboyNeal owns a star trek uniform, doesn't mean he is a member of StarFleet... or is he?

Re:Is there a collection of sources packages

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. It's called the FreeBSD Toolkit, and can be found at the following address: http://www.freebsdmall.com/cgi-bin/fm/bsdtool?id=Z jIbzhtY&mv_pc=21 [freebsdmall.com]. This box contains most of the source archives ("distfiles") you can use locally for compiling the Ports (put them in /usr/ports/distfiles).

Ports

[The_Final_Word]

Ports schmorts, don't be girly grab the source and compile. If it doesn't work it's not worth trying.

Anyways, who's going to count them all to make sure no-one's telling fibs?

Re:Ports

[corrosiv]

"grab the source and compile" is exactly what the BSD ports system does

Re:Ports

[nochops]

Ummm....ports are source, dipshit.

Don't be girly and just make dumb comments about BSD's features when you haven't a clue.