Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2005 20:58:10 -0700 (PDT) From: Milscvaer <millueradfa@yahoo.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Regarding packages and ports, up to dateness Message-ID: <20050918035810.85481.qmail@web54506.mail.yahoo.com>
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Recently, I have installed FreeBSD 5.4, first I would like to thank all those who work on for such a stable, useable operating system. I have tried OpenBSD and NetBSD on many of my computers, which would not boot at all. FreeBSD is the only OS that will boot on many of the computers we have and hopefully FreeBSD will to work to make sure that hardware compatability is improved and maintained. However, there is room for improvement. One of the major issues I have is with the out of date binary packages available for the latest stable release (5.4). Yes, I know that there are much more up to data packages in Ports, I know many people just love spending hours of time compiling and recompiling ports over and over agian every time they want a new version of software X, but many of us have better ways to spend our time and computer resources. Many of us do not have fast enough computers to make this possible (it would take a week). Please, please, please offer up to date packages compiled from the latest version of its port for the latest stable release of FreeBSD. Perhaps you can set up a system to automatically rebuild a binary package from its port when that specific port as been upgraded to a new version and put it up on the FTP sites. This would only require a particular package to have to be rebuilt when its port has been updated to a new version. This would save a lot of people a lot of time. Please. Also, I have a question, if I binary upgrade FreeBSD, I can continue to use existing packages I have from the previous version, right? What if a package from a previous version and a package from a current version of FreeBSD require the same dynamically linked library (such as the same version of GTK). Do both packages share the same dynamically linked library, or do the binaries from older versions and newer versions each require a different build of the same library? Can dynamic libraries from previous versions of FreeBSD be loaded into programs compiled for the latest version of freebsd, and vice versa? If not, how does FreeBSD handle this mess? Thank you. __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com
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