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Date:      Tue, 06 Jul 2004 15:27:06 +0200
From:      Volker <volker@vwsoft.com>
To:        seb11@ciaoweb.it
Cc:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Ports (was: Call for FreeBSD status reports)
Message-ID:  <40EAA8AA.7040600@vwsoft.com>
In-Reply-To: <20040706120136.EC43016A4D5@hub.freebsd.org>
References:  <20040706120136.EC43016A4D5@hub.freebsd.org>

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Hi Pino!

>   1. could be 5.0 a good base to start to join a quite STABLE
>      configuration?

STABLE (in the meaning of production stable) is currently at the 4.x 
branch. This is still the recommended version for production (live) systems.

If you're wanting to give the new technology a try, you should use the 
latest CURRENT (development) branch. The latest release of the CURRENT 
branch is 5.2.1. From my point of view I would suggest to use that 
version in favour of 5.0 or 5.1 releases.

You may get a stable working system even with the CURRENT releases but 
that depends on (mostly) your hardware. Some components are only 
available at the CURRENT branch so if you've some special needs, you 
should use a 5.x-RELEASE version.

> 
>   2. where I can get (order and buy) tarball ports on cd's and, in such
>      case, what should be the right order to get the appropriate versions,
>      according to the level of patching and evolution of the FreeBSD
>      version (non matter which, 5.0 or different ...) I'll be using?
> 

I don't think you will really need all of the 7000+ sources of the ports 
system. The ports system comes with some thousand files (mostly 
makesfiles) and these files are carrying the information where to get 
the files for a port in question. So if you want to install a single 
port, just cd to /usr/ports/???/??? and 'make install clean' while your 
machine is online. That will fetch the sources of the port and any 
dependencies, compile and install.

It really doesn't make sense to have all these 7000+ ports be installed 
on a single machine.

My production machine (server, router, gateway - one does it all - 
machine) currently has only 168 ports installed. Do not install any 
ports you won't need!

Also the ports collection is not a bunch of source code. You may see it 
as a maintaned database which holds information about where to get the 
source archives for a single port. The ports collection itself doesn't 
depend on -STABLE or -CURRENT. You may even rcp/rsync/scp your ports 
collection from a 4.9-STABLE machine to a 5.2-CURRENT machine.

HTH,

Volker


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