Re: Why Are You NOT Using FreeBSD?

On 03.06.12 23:55, O. Hartmann wrote:
> On 06/03/12 15:29, Erich wrote:
>> yes, you miss a very simple thing. Updated this morning your ports tree. Your client asks for something for Monday morning for which you need now a program which needs some kind of PNG but you did not install it.
> ... I spent now two complete days watching my boxes updating their
> ports. Several ports do not compile anymore (inkscape, libreoffice,
> libxul, to name some of the very hurting ones!).

Someone forced you to recompile your ports? :)

Just for the record, I too saw a lot of re-compilation necessary because 
of this PNG library update and for the most part, this was not 
necessary, but unfortunately this is how the ports dependencies are 
described by their maintainers - the upgrade tools like portmaster or 
portupgrade can hardly help much here.

Anyway, I am rebuilding on occasions like this just for the fun of it. 
Always have spare/backup system to work on while my primary desktop 
rebuilds because it breaks from time to time. By the way, this rebuild 
didn't give my lowly dual-core core2 6300 at 1.86 GHz much trouble.

In any case, suppose a customer comes and asks for an application that 
uses PNG, you just updated your ports tree and then you either:

1. Have already libpng installed.
Then you just don't rebuild libpng, just install the new software. You 
do this by going to the ports directory like 
/usr/ports/cathegory/greatstuff and type "make install". This will use 
the existing libpng on your system. No trouble.

2. Don't have libpng installed yet.
You install the new port any way you like. Since you have no libpng on 
your system, you have no dependencies to upgrade (and wait). You will 
end up with the new libpng on your system. No trouble.

Applying some common sense to these situations helps great deal. It also 
helps to avoid any prejudice towards FreeBSD or whatever OS you end up 
using in the process.


Daniel