install a por

[Brandon Allbery]

On Sun, Sep 28, 2014 at 2:59 AM, Jan Stary <hans at stare.cz> wrote:

> I must be missing your point. What's a "linux-like" package system
> as opposed to a "build-from-port" system? Every package built from a port.
> How does using options/variants of a port make the resulting package
> less usefull (then having a lot of separate packages).
>

Combinatorial explosion prevents you from building every package in every
combination of every variant (with every possible dependency, etc.)

Package systems like rpm/yum and dpkg/apt use a combination of "provides"
dependencies (so a package will work with any other package that provides a
particular dependency, unlike FreeBSD packages where if the package was
built against mysql 5.5 you can't tell it to install against mariadb 5.5).
They also use plugins instead of build-time variants, so you install the
base package and the plugins you need.

Concrete examples of this come up in #freebsd fairly regularly, usually
related to trying to install apache+mysql+php in some configuration that
isn't the ports' respective defaults --- the binary packages are useless to
them as a result.

-- 
brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
allbery.b at gmail.com                                  ballbery at sinenomine.net
unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-users/attachments/20140928/3df040ca/attachment.html>