Nick Rout wrote:
I have it on just one machine, which is a laptop that I use sporadically
rather than a crtical every day machine. There are differences between BSD
ports and gentoo portage. Primarily I do not see any equivalent to USE,
The ports can be configured with the WITH_* and WITHOUT_* knobs. They
change the behaviour of some ports, e.g. WITHOUT_X11 will remove the
dependency on X11 in ports that can be installed without it.
Some ports use a newer system where you can configure what it and have
the settings saved. It gives you a selection of what parts you want then
sets the WITH_* and WITHOUT_* knobs appropriately.
nor do i see multi variations of any package.
There are for some ports but they are in separate directories, e.g.
devel/autoconf213, devel/autoconf253 and devel/autoconf259.
However I do think there are
stable and unstable branches, but i have not got my head around it.
The base system has a bleeding-edge branch named CURRENT. There is also
a one or more branches where the developers have designated to have a
stable fell to it, i.e. a branch where names of config variables, api,
abi, etc will not change. These are named STABLE. The version is
prefixed to the name so we currently have 7-CURRENT, 6-STABLE, 5-STABLE
and 4-STABLE. Each of these branches follow POLA[1].
The ports collection is not branched. It is tagged for each release but
you should update it after you've installed FreeBSD as it is usually 2-4
weeks out of date when the release is made.
Andrew
[1]
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/freebsd-glossary.html#POLA-GLOSSARY
