Date: 10 Apr 2003 11:49:51 +1000 From: Charles Young <charles@wranglers.com.au> To: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Replacing Win95 with FreeBSD for low cost home PCs Message-ID: <1049939391.47109.31.camel@feynman> In-Reply-To: <16020.15129.740634.315264@guru.mired.org> References: <1049855817.93999.84.camel@feynman> <16020.15129.740634.315264@guru.mired.org>
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On Thu, 2003-04-10 at 01:24, Mike Meyer wrote: > In <1049855817.93999.84.camel@feynman>, Charles Young <charles@wranglers.com.au> typed: > > What I've done is to set up a meta port of a workstation suite and then > > install this on each machine from a central dist site via NFS. I found > > there were fewer issues this way, though the build process can take a > > mighty long time. > > Might I suggest - to both of you - that these would be easier if you > built packages out of these, and nfs-mounted the directory with the > packages in them? That way you'd only have to build things once, and > could still install everything by installing the package of the > meta-port. <snip> I like the way you think Mike, however I have chosen to do this via ports rather than packages because of three reasons: 1. For reasons that I can only define as religious, I like to build things for a specific target architecture - which means optimising for the specific CPU and devices in the system. As I'm installing into offices that have generally grown organically, there is usually no standardised hardware. This means building a new kernel for each machine. While this does not necessarily mean anything once I get to install ports - philosophically I prefer to build an entire system in the same manner - I've a feeling (completely without measured basis I might point out) that OpenOffice.org, for example, behaves better if built from source on the target machine. 2. I find updating from sources much cleaner that using packages. New Xft? no problem, just run a portupgrade -fr Xft. 3. One of the companies has two offices separated by a VPN over an ADSL connection. Bandwidth through this is restricted. I have a push tool (imaginatively entitled 'pushtool') that triggers a cvsup, portsdb -uU and portupgrade with the supplied arguments on the remote machine. I use this to do sitewide updates at selected moments using a central CVS repository. Doing this via source means that often only patches are transferred which I don't believe is ever the case for packages. I must admit, however that this is a special case, as usually I just mount /usr/ports/distfiles on the workstations via NFS to a file server, so generally there would be no difference. OK having typed all this I find I can't really justify my stance scientifically except for point 3 and then only in certain circumstances. It just feels better to me to do stuff with source. Perhaps I should move this thread to freebsd-pseudo-religious-build-processes. Charles ----------------- Charles Young digital Wranglers www.wranglers.com.au
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