Chuck Robey wrote: > Seeing as it's grossly impossible to install directly from sources, that > question seems to be rather moot. If it's a reasonable option, then I want to > build my own. I wonder if that's not often true of many, maybe most, of the > folks on this list?
I think you're confusing the romance of "building everything from source" with the reality of "what you get is identical to the package you could have just downloaded." The whole point of ports is to be a shortcut to grabbing the tarball, reading through the build options, making sure you have the right version of automake or whatever, etc. The point of packages is to remove the one time-consuming step - compilation - that everyone was still doing identically on every machine to which they installed a port. If you don't want all those decisions made for you, the ports system is just as bad as installing packages, except you ALSO have a time-consuming-but-completely-automated step to take. -- Matthew Weigel hacker unique & idempot . ent
