On 2008-12-31 at 18:49 -0800, Michael G Schwern wrote: > My only real experience with BSD-style packages is with MacPorts. I have no > idea what their relation really is, but BSD ports can't possibly be this bad > and have such a rabid following.
> God forbid I wanted to fix any of this because it's a 3250 line program > written in TEE CEE ELLLLLLLLL!!!! That's not BSD Ports/Packages. Ports is the system of Make files used for the tree of available software. Packages are the binary packages. You can install packages directly or build the packages yourself. Both upward and downward dependencies are tracked and it's trivial to recursively remove packages, or list recursively all packages which depend on a given package, or which the package depends on, using the standard pkg_info, pkg_delete etc commands. All the pkg_* commands have decent man-pages, etc. You *appear* to be using something using the same guts but wrapped up in a different front-end which either doesn't expose the functionality or which you don't know the options for (which might be a documentation issue). But no, BSD Ports are not as bad as what you're describing. Rather better than just about anything else I've used; the Debian apt-* tools are stronger for binary management in that the front-ends understand multiple sources for binaries inherently (but not all that well). -Phil
