Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2010 16:42:40 +0000 From: Michel Talon <talon@lpthe.jussieu.fr> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Which OS for notebook Message-ID: <20101006164240.GA15467@lpthe.jussieu.fr>
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Chad Perrin wrote: > Another thing to consider is the ease of maintaining the software on > > the machine. My personal opinion is that Ubuntu (more generally > > Debian) > > is light years ahead of FreeBSD in this domain. > > How is it "light years ahead" of FreeBSD for "the ease of maintaining > the > software on the machine"? I'm curious about what you mean. I mean that the concept of maintaining a full set of binary packages which has been verified by the distribution maintainers and remain usable for an extended period of time, combined with an effective binary upgrader (apt-get, aptitude), is light years ahead, for ease of use and convenience, to a rolling release style "bazar" like FreeBSD ports, combined with tools like portupgrade, which sort of work only when you spend all your time running them daily, after having sacrificed a young virgin to the gods. I concede that the FreeBSD way allows to have very up to date ports, and to be in control of compilation options and so on. Personnally i don't have much use for these benefits. Of course i am aware that these assertions are quite heretic in this community, however i remark that the above considerations have found their way for the base system, since there exists definite releases, thoroughly verified by the developers, and suffering only security bug fixes, which moreover can be upgraded with binary tools. Even more, there are ports freezes, during the preparation of these releases, allowing to get a relatively coherent set of packages for the release. One may imagine this is the first step in a similar strategy for the ports as for the base system. But in this very thread, most competent ports folks explain us that the first thing to do is throw away the ports tree which has been used in the release and consequently the packages which have been compiled with it, and preferably indulge in the daily ritual of running csup, and invoking the manes of portupgrade or portmaster, of course after having carefully read UPDATING. Beleive it or not, i click on an icon of my Ubuntu laptop, and get the same result without any further interaction. -- Michel TALON
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