From owner-freebsd-ports Wed May 8 16:46:13 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Received: from smtp-1.paradise.net.nz (smtp-1.paradise.net.nz [203.96.152.111]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4EAD837B410 for ; Wed, 8 May 2002 16:46:10 -0700 (PDT) Received: from there (203-79-83-91.cable.paradise.net.nz [203.79.83.91]) by smtp-1.paradise.net.nz (Postfix) with SMTP id B40CA1E47CC for ; Thu, 9 May 2002 23:49:09 +1200 (NZST) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" From: David Preece Organization: - To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Subject: Pro's, advanced use and some general ports confusion. Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 11:48:06 +1200 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.3.2] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-Id: <20020509114909.B40CA1E47CC@smtp-1.paradise.net.nz> Sender: owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org I've been using FreeBSD for around two-three years, ish, have recently started playing with other unixen (notably Debian) and have got to wondering why, exactly, building from source is a good idea? Is it because we can get over some library versioning problems? There are other advantages that I would have thought a no-brainer to add to the ports collection that I can't find any documentation on. For instance, is it possible to build a port for only the 586 instruction set? Can we change the optimisation level on gcc when we're building from scratch? Perhaps use a different compiler? Is there a way I can add a global list of extra locations where the distfiles may be located - a local FTP server for instance? Since all ports can be turned into packages with 'make package', why do there appear to be far fewer packages than ports? And if all this can be done, where's the doc :) Apologies for my weak grip on English today, one of those things. Cheers, Dave To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-ports" in the body of the message