I think the remaining difference that's an advantage of ports is that you
can configure them differently. At the outermost level you can set a
flavor to enable/disable some feature, at a lower level you can modify the
makefile, still lower you can get in there and edit the source.
Back when you used to choose a machine type (i386,i486,i596, etc.) in the
kernel configuration I used to think building from ports got better
optimization for your cpu type, assuming you built your kernel first.
Packages are smaller to download, at least usually.
But I'll still keep using ports just because I like having the code to
study.
Alan
On Sat, 5 May 2012, Dimitry T wrote:
After a long reading I am still confused. On OpenBSD FAQ recommend to use
packages, most users speak the same, but some speak that it is safer to compile
programs from ports and then programs have better performance. Did I get the
better performance of the program on my hardware if i compile that program on
my hardware from ports? I try to compare md5 of package compiled from ports
with package downloaded from package server, and values b b do not match.
Surely I wrong somewhere, but I would like someone to explain me packages vs
ports.
