Ports and packages

Begin
On 2006-02-25, Steve wrote:
> This machine is for email and web surfing (KDE), word processing
> (OpenOffice), and some light Java development (Eclipse)... other than
> that there isn't any software installed.

This is a usage of ``light'' that I'm not familiar with. To wit, you're
summing up just about the heaviest available applications to be had
through the ports.


> - Have I just been INCREDIBLY unlucky with my timing, or do new port
> snapshot versions really come out once every week or two for huge
> applications like KDE or OpenOffice? Is it even possible for someone with
> a non-trivial amount of software to stay current with the ports system?

You could look up the update history. It's in cvs and a quick overview
can be had using cvsweb. I think your timing was unfortunate.


> - What do you use to update software on your PC or workstation box? I can
> see the value of building from source for a rack-mounted box serving a
> specialize purpose, but for a PC or laptop environment I just don't see any
> advantages for the ports system at all.

Many use the ports, simply because it's convenient. Many also stay well
away from the top-N heaviest applications exactly because they're so
heavy, both in building and in use. I for one, feel no need to use any
of them.

When I *had* to support java, then on FreeBSD 4, I built it once, kept
the packages, and vowed to never update it unless absolutely necessairy.
And that with a dedicated build machine available. Building a new
postgresql, and upgrading the installed one with a careful dump/resore
cycle thrown in was a breeze by comparison, and took a fraction of the
time.

You're right that the tradeoff seems a bit adverse for these. But then,
if you don't want to spend the cycles building them, that's what the
pre-built packages are for. You lose some control, and maybe can't use
the absolute bleeding edge of the application, but save cycles.


> - The FreeBSD Handbook tells you how to set an environmental variable to
> determine whether "pkg" tools pull from the RELEASE, STABLE, or CURRENT
> branches. Does the ports collection match up with CURRENT, or is it some
> kind of "HYPER-CURRENT" branch that is more bleeding-edge than CURRENT?

No. There is only the head of the ports tree. It works a tad differently
than the release engineering for the base system. What you're referring
to is the collection of pre-built packages built for a specific release.

At RELEASE time, the ports tree gets frozen and its packages built (all
of them, modulo exceptions) and those get tagged with the RELEASE. They
don't get updated. This is what the environment variable refers to.

If you update your local ports tree you'll get the latest version and so
what you're building may very well be newer than is on offer from the
pre-built packages sites for your particular release.


> Can you control the state of your ports collection? I'm just not sure how
> ports and pkg's are supposed to work together... I would basically like to
> be running a STABLE system, but does that mean I am prohibited from using
> the ports tools?

That would be rather useless, wouldn't it? You can use the ports and
you can use the packages and you can even mix&match, up to a point.
Your ports collection is entirely in your hands. You can even checkout
specific bits from specific dates to resurrect dead ports, if you wish
to do so. But it does mean rebuilding ports if you want to update.

If you don't want to rebuild stuff, there's prebuilt packages, but you
don't have quite the same degree of control over them. It's a tradeoff.


--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
This message was originally posted on Usenet in plain text.
Any other representation, additions, or changes do not have my
consent and may be a violation of international copyright law.
 >> Stay informed about: Ports and packages 

> This is a usage of ``light'' that I'm not familiar with. To wit, you're
> summing up just about the heaviest available applications to be had
> through the ports.

I don't know that you speak for the entire FreeBSD community, but this
regardless seems to be setting the bar awfully low. On Linux you may be
using IBM's commercial development platform built on top of Eclipse, which
is GIGABYTES in size. Eclipse is less than a hundred megs, it and the JDK
together built in a matter of hours, I don't really have any complaints
there. However, the attitude seems to be that anything beyond a
rack-mounted console-based Apache+PHP server is not a very tenable use of
FreeBSD. In every segment of the industry with which I am familiar, a box
used primarily for web surfing and word processing would absolutely be
described as "light". "Heavy" would entail running WebSphere Application
Server, or an Oracle database, or perhaps a typical PC video game these
days.


> You could look up the update history. It's in cvs and a quick overview
> can be had using cvsweb.

My line of questioning makes it obvious that I'm fairly new with this
system, I can't help but feel it's a little ridiculous to have the
expectation that I would be crawling through the developers' CVS repository
looking for notes... rather than the standard approach of thoroughly
reading the manual and asking questions that don't seem to be covered. If
I ask a question that seems to you to be lazy or a waste of time, please
just ignore it.


> At RELEASE time, the ports tree gets frozen and its packages built (all
> of them, modulo exceptions) and those get tagged with the RELEASE. They
> don't get updated. This is what the environment variable refers to.
>
> If you update your local ports tree you'll get the latest version and so
> what you're building may very well be newer than is on offer from the
> pre-built packages sites for your particular release.

I understand what the RELEASE tag is. I suppose I am more murky on what
STABLE and CURRENT mean. Are you saying that those tags apply only to
base-OS compenents, and not to any ports? If so, was my understand correct
that the ports lack standard tags, that your options are simply "bleeding
edge" or "specified backdated point in time"? If that is the case, what
kind of QA testing goes into each new version of a port before it is
released into the ports collection?

Basically I would like to run a system that is fairly current, but not
necessarily bleeding-edge (where my box is a guinea pig for the community),
and I'm having a hard time figuring out accomplish this feat with FreeBSD.
With most Linux distributions, this is a trivial deal... you just specify
what branch you want to be in sync with (from stable to bleeding-edge,
usually with a moderate choice in between), and apt-get or rpm or whatever
keeps your whole system in-sync with that branch. Simple. Is that model
even possible with BSD, or does everyone have to cobble together some
hand-sewn approach where they're "sort of" in-sync to some degree of their
own choosing... and where their base OS and their applications are syncing
against different targets?
 >> Stay informed about: Ports and packages 

+ Steve :

| I understand what the RELEASE tag is. I suppose I am more
| murky on what STABLE and CURRENT mean.

CURRENT means what it says. It's the bleeding edge. Not to be
tracked lightly. Basically, as I have understood it, new stuff is put
in the CURRENT branch, then as bugs are weeded out and the code looks
solid, it is moved to STABLE. And from there it is just a hop, skip
and a jump into the next RELEASE.

| Are you saying that those tags apply only to base-OS compenents, and
| not to any ports?

I think that is what he was saying. Well, they also apply to binary
packages, which are not the same as ports. Ports after all are source
code, and ought to build on many different versions of the OS. But
packages, being binary, may depend on the libraries of a specific OS
version.

| Basically I would like to run a system that is fairly
| current, but not necessarily bleeding-edge (where my box is a guinea
| pig for the community), and I'm having a hard time figuring out
| accomplish this feat with FreeBSD.

YMMV as they say, but I have always just stayed with the lates RELEASE
and been quite content with that. I have even skipped one now and
then. Heck, the machine I write this on still runs 5.3! If you wish
to have access to the most urgent security and bug fixes, just track
RELENG_* instead.

(I skipped most of your other questions. I speak only as a (happy)
FreeBSD user, and most certainly not for the developers.)

--
* Harald Hanche-Olsen <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition
when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
-- Bertrand Russell
 >> Stay informed about: Ports and packages 

Steve schrieb:
> As soon as I got everything up and running, I CVSup'ed and watch
> portupgrade spend the next four days straight updating KDE and OpenOffice.
> When that finished I ran CVSup again, and have spent the past couple of
> days compiling NEW updates to KDE and OpenOffice. This machine has been
> compiling continously since I first turned it on over a week ago, and even
> though I have a small number of ports installed it seems that they update
> faster than I can compile.

KDE and OpenOffice are both a pain to compile. The days I used KDE, I
updated it using a precompiled package. The same matters for OpenOffice2.

> I have read the packages and ports section of the FreeBSD Handbook, and
> understand at a basic level what tools are available. However, there seems
> to be little or no documentation about best practices, so I there are a
> couple of questions I wanted to ask the community:
>
> - Have I just been INCREDIBLY unlucky with my timing, or do new port
> snapshot versions really come out once every week or two for huge
> applications like KDE or OpenOffice? Is it even possible for someone with
> a non-trivial amount of software to stay current with the ports system?

Yes it is. Usually, KDE and OpenOffice need some time to get to a new
version-number. It's still possible that you compile your packages just
in between the time of a new release of one of those programs.

Reading the particular project websites helps to avoid this.
freshports.org is also very chatty wether a program/application is in
the ports or not.

I update my system every month and I always build all from source
(except OpenOffice2). I don't notice remarably version changes
This is sufficent for me.

> - What do you use to update software on your PC or workstation box?

I run 'portupgrade -afu' after each update.
>
> - The FreeBSD Handbook tells you how to set an environmental variable to
> determine whether "pkg" tools pull from the RELEASE, STABLE, or CURRENT
> branches. Does the ports collection match up with CURRENT, or is it some
> kind of "HYPER-CURRENT" branch that is more bleeding-edge than CURRENT?

No, it isn't.

> Can you control the state of your ports collection? I'm just not sure how
> ports and pkg's are supposed to work together... I would basically like to
> be running a STABLE system, but does that mean I am prohibited from using
> the ports tools?

No, you can use the ports tools. To keep track of the development, run
cvsup regularly. This ensures your ports-tree remains current for the
branch you are tracking.

The difference between ports and packages is (in short) that packages
are precompiled binaries and ports have to be compiled locally on your
machine.


However, I encourage you to read the sections about ports and system
upgrade in the handbook once again.

HTH,
Philipp
 >> Stay informed about: Ports and packages 

[do include attributions and please watch your line lengths]
Begin
On 2006-02-25, Steve wrote:
>> This is a usage of ``light'' that I'm not familiar with. To wit,
>> you're summing up just about the heaviest available applications to
>> be had through the ports.
>
> I don't know that you speak for the entire FreeBSD community,

Uhm. No. Did I imply such? How? Where?


> but this regardless seems to be setting the bar awfully low. On Linux
> you may be using IBM's commercial development platform built on top of
> Eclipse, which is GIGABYTES in size. Eclipse is less than a hundred
> megs, it and the JDK together built in a matter of hours, I don't
> really have any complaints there. However, the attitude seems to be
> that anything beyond a rack-mounted console-based Apache+PHP server is
> not a very tenable use of FreeBSD.

If you say so. I do have a penchant for only running that what I really
need. So for example, if I have some html content to serve, it gets
generated once from its sources, and my standard webserver is thttpd,
not apache. This on the theory that things should be ``as simple as
possible, but no simpler''. These, however, are my personal preferences.

As an aside, note that your assumptions of jdk being easily built *on
linux* do not necessairily hold on FreeBSD, in large part for reasons
outside of the project's control.


> In every segment of the industry with which I am familiar, a box
> used primarily for web surfing and word processing would absolutely
> be described as "light". "Heavy" would entail running WebSphere
> Application Server, or an Oracle database, or perhaps a typical PC
> video game these days.

I was more talking about *building* the stuff, which you were complaining
about, than about *using* it. How this comes to mean FreeBSD cannot and
will not run anything bigger, or how I am suddenly the local authoritative
voice on the matter, again eludes me.

You are welcome to clarify your reasoning here.


>> You could look up the update history. It's in cvs and a quick overview
>> can be had using cvsweb.
>
> My line of questioning makes it obvious that I'm fairly new
> with this system, I can't help but feel it's a little ridiculous to
> have the expectation that I would be crawling through the developers'
> CVS repository looking for notes... rather than the standard approach
> of thoroughly reading the manual and asking questions that don't seem
> to be covered. If I ask a question that seems to you to be lazy or a
> waste of time, please just ignore it.
[more jibing snipped]

Oh, in that case. I will ignore you from now on, yes. That does indeed
sound like a good idea. Please do move back to linux or wherever it is
you came from, as you are clearly happier there.


--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
This message was originally posted on Usenet in plain text.
Any other representation, additions, or changes do not have my
consent and may be a violation of international copyright law.
 >> Stay informed about: Ports and packages 

Steve wrote:
> About a week and a half ago I loaded FreeBSD 6.0 on my ThinkPad laptop with
> a 1 GHz processor. This machine is for email and web surfing (KDE), word
> processing (OpenOffice), and some light Java development (Eclipse)... other
> than that there isn't any software installed.

KDE is huge. I've recently given up on KDE for end users, and switched
the "desktop PC for the relatives" to xfce4. They don't see any
difference, and it's much easier for me to handle. It's actually
tempting me away from fluxbox. (Biggest problem: convincing their ISP
that a user doesn't actually have Windows.)

OpenOffice updates aren't usually very frequent, although there have
been a couple of 2.0 release candidates lately. Load it with a
package, or just exclude it from a portupgrade with -x.

> - Have I just been INCREDIBLY unlucky with my timing, or do new port
> snapshot versions really come out once every week or two for huge
> applications like KDE or OpenOffice? Is it even possible for someone with
> a non-trivial amount of software to stay current with the ports system?

Big "desktop environments" are a problem for lots of people, KDE maybe
less so than Gnome based on user postings.

For keeping applications current:

cvsup ports
make fetchindex
check /usr/ports/UPDATING
pkg_version -vL=
use portupgrade with "-r" to upgrade what you desire (see the manpage
for -x usage, too)

> - What do you use to update software on your PC or workstation box? I can
> see the value of building from source for a rack-mounted box serving a
> specialize purpose, but for a PC or laptop environment I just don't see any
> advantages for the ports system at all.

Ports offers customizing in several ways that packages can't.

> - The FreeBSD Handbook tells you how to set an environmental variable to
> determine whether "pkg" tools pull from the RELEASE, STABLE, or CURRENT
> branches. Does the ports collection match up with CURRENT, or is it some
> kind of "HYPER-CURRENT" branch that is more bleeding-edge than CURRENT?
> Can you control the state of your ports collection? I'm just not sure how
> ports and pkg's are supposed to work together... I would basically like to
> be running a STABLE system, but does that mean I am prohibited from using
> the ports tools?

No, it encourages the use of ports because the packages aren't built
as often.

--
Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota * USA
 >> Stay informed about: Ports and packages 

+ Warren Block :

| For keeping applications current:
|
| cvsup ports
| make fetchindex

I'd like to put in a plug for portsnap here. It seems a lot faster
than the above, at least so long as you run it regularly:

portsnap fetch && portsnap update

| check /usr/ports/UPDATING
| pkg_version -vL=
| use portupgrade with "-r" to upgrade what you desire (see the manpage
| for -x usage, too)

--
* Harald Hanche-Olsen <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition
when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
-- Bertrand Russell
 >> Stay informed about: Ports and packages 

+ "127.0.0.1" :

| Steve wrote:
|
|> Is it even possible for someone with
|> a non-trivial amount of software to stay current with the ports system?
|
| As for openoffice, I can't comment.

I think the fact that it asks for 9GB of disk space for the build,
speaks volumes. Even if it doesn't require frequent updates, building
it just once from sources is clearly not for the faint of heart. I
aborted the build myself the moment I saw that.

--
* Harald Hanche-Olsen <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition
when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
-- Bertrand Russell
 >> Stay informed about: Ports and packages 

"Harald Hanche-Olsen" wrote in message

>+ "127.0.0.1" :
>
> | Steve wrote:
> |
> |> Is it even possible for someone with
> |> a non-trivial amount of software to stay current with the ports system?
> |
> | As for openoffice, I can't comment.
>
> I think the fact that it asks for 9GB of disk space for the build,
> speaks volumes. Even if it doesn't require frequent updates, building
> it just once from sources is clearly not for the faint of heart. I
> aborted the build myself the moment I saw that.
>
> --
> * Harald Hanche-Olsen <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
> - It is undesirable to believe a proposition
> when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
> -- Bertrand Russell

As a longtime user and fanantic of FreeBSD but still just a guy who only
does this as a hobby I'll weigh in too that building a complete
KDE/OpenOffice install is a complete waste of time. I had a 2.0 Gig
processor and a screaming connection that would download an entire CD size
file in only 3 minutes. I watched this setup for almost 48 hours before I
finally said the heck with it and gave up. Life moves to fast for this kind
of latency.
 >> Stay informed about: Ports and packages 

hello,

Ditch Brodie wrote:
> "Harald Hanche-Olsen" wrote in message
>
>>+ "127.0.0.1" :
>> | Steve wrote:
>> |> Is it even possible for someone with a non-trivial amount
>> |> of software to stay current with the ports system?
>> | As for openoffice, I can't comment.
>> I think the fact that it asks for 9GB of disk space for the
>> build, speaks volumes. Even if it doesn't require frequent

<snip>
> As a longtime user and fanantic of FreeBSD but still just a guy
> who only does this as a hobby

thank god for your message. i thought it was just me!

> I'll weigh in too that building a complete KDE/OpenOffice
> install is a complete waste of time. I had a 2.0 Gig processor
> and a screaming connection ... I watched this setup for almost
> 48 hours before I finally said the heck with it and gave up.

i'll weigh in with my own sad version: my processor's only 1.6
gig, and while i do have some version of broadband, i can only
envy your 'screaming connection.' i'm uncertain just how much
time i've actually wasted. it's a learning experience,
definitely.

i hate to say it, but you may have given up too soon. you were
almost there. i watched mine for 48 h too, enduring all my 'wild
imaginings' of my windows/linux buddies chortling at their 1/2 h
download/install/up-and-running experiences, and then, one
morning, the root console i had it chuntering away in, displayed
the root prompt again! either hell had just frozen, or the
apocalypse is upon us.

sadly, i now have to head over to gmane's openoffice-questions to
see what i have to do to get the mother to actually *run* now.
the docs say a line should be in the kde-start listings, but i
don't have one. nine gigabits and they can't get a simple start
listing?

and does anyone have a REASON why this thing needs that much real
estate? i ran autoCAD 10 on less than 40 megs ferheavenssakes.
just asking.
-
= df(dave)armour<at>myrealbox<dough>calm! =
 >> Stay informed about: Ports and packages