Re: assimilating OpenBSD

[Jeff Sheinberg <jeffsh@erols.com>]

Mark W. Eichin writes:
 > 
 > > Now on the same note...  BSD has a great packaging and porting system,
 > > arguably as good if not better than debians.  I like the idea of using
 > 
 > It might be arguable, but the argument ends very quickly, when I ask
 > someone to explain "how do I upgrade something that has
 > dependencies".  The BSD side kind of splutters to a halt at that point
 > (hint: any answer involving "uninstall the packages that depend on it,
 > first" means "thank you for playing, get back to us when you have a
 > packaging system"...)
 > 
 > packages/ports are great for building software *once*.  Experience
                                                  ^^^^^^
Once is more than enough, I have not had such good luck building
many FreeBSD ports, even once.  So I tried their pre-built
`packages', with only about 50% failure rate of self-building.

Debian packages just plain `work' for me, that's why I am
interested in debian-bsd.

And all of the *BSD `system' binaries need to be made into Debian
packages, it seems many people think the critical path is getting
the Debian packaging tools to work on *BSD.  It is not, check the
mailing list archives, this has already been done, and more than
once, too!

FreeBSD has the best partition handling, for this flexibility, the
FreeBSD kernel, imo, is the one to use.

 > (with debian and elsewhere) makes it pretty clear that no software is
 > good enough to stand unchanged for any significant length of time, and
 > that smooth upgrading is the key reason to even *have* a packaging
 > system...

-- 
Jeff Sheinberg  <jeffsh@erols.com>