Re: Ports like system for debian.

[Kyle Dassoff <kyle.dassoff@gmail.com>]

It isn't Debian, but Arch is a nice distro as long as you don't mind 
configuring more of the system on your own. I've been using Arch for a 
while (as well as Debian).
Gentoo is also a good choice if you want tons of control over how 
packages are compiled (look up USE flags on Gentoo's documentation) and 
don't mind the fact that installation of software takes a _long_ time, 
since it's source based and everything is compiled during installation. 
I used to use Gentoo a while ago, and it's a great system, but I 
personally found it to be more effort than I was willing to put in and 
large programs took too long to compile.

If you're looking for a ports-like system to run on top of Debian, you 
can also check out NetBSD's pkgsrc. It started out as a fork of the 
ports system and is very similar, but NetBSD runs the project and it 
runs on more than just NetBSD. They have instructions and downloads for 
non-NetBSD systems, and I believe it will install into /usr/local like 
FreeBSD's Ports does. I haven't used pkgsrc myself, so I can't give you 
any more information than that.
http://www.netbsd.org/docs/software/packages.html -- pkgsrc home page

--Kyle

On 2010-05-27 11:21, Javier Vasquez wrote:
> On 5/26/10, Stan Hoeppner<stan@hardwarefreak.com>  wrote:
>    
> > Madhurya Kakati put forth on 5/26/2010 10:15 PM:
> >      
> > > Is there a bsd ports like system in debian?
> > >        
> > I believe you're looking for the Gentoo Portage system:
> >
> > http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/about.xml
> >
> > AFAIK, there is no Debian equivalent, nor any other Linux distro, that
> > manages
> > and builds packages from source, in the manner of BSD ports or Gentoo
> > Portage.
> >
> > --
> > Stan
> >      
> If you're talking about source based dostros like gentoo, there are
> others which are pretty good as well...  Examples:
>
> sourceMage  (I like this one a lot)
> sorcerer (never tried it, but it's the original sorcery stuff)
> Lunar (as sourceMage forked from sorcerer)
>
> There might be others based on linux from scratch as well...  So
> gentoo is not the only option around, although perhpas the mos known
> among the source based distros...  Bad thing about source based
> distros for me is that I have pretty slow old boxes, and when
> compiling lets say gcc, g++, gcj, and the like, well, it just takes
> forever...
>
> One binary distro that comes closer to freeBSD ports concept is
> archLinux, it has in its binary repos a "core", an "extra", and
> "community" provided binaries.  But if you don't find what you need
> there's also AUR, which is a repo with pacman PKGBUILDs available and
> with yaourt for example you can install them almost the same way you
> install binaries, but what happens beneath is that the sources are
> downloaded, the package is built, and then finally installed...
>
> So not debian, but closer to the freeBSD approach.  Another thing
> similar to freeBSD is the init scripts stuff, controlled by rc.conf...
>
> Bad thing is that it's not debian, :-)  Also bad thing is that it only
> supports i686 and x86_64, plus an early port to ARM (non official
> project), and another port to hurd (that just started, non official as
> well)...  Did I say bad thing it's not debian already, :-)
>
>