On Wed, Mar 07, 2012 at 12:57:46PM -0500, David Jackson wrote: > > So it seems like a happy compromise here. You will get what you need > and us newbies and other users who really dont want the extra > trouble of compiling will get our binaries. Everyone gets what they > want and is happy, it seems. >
Yes, this sounds awfully good, except that I think it is much harder than you think. First, some options are mutually exclusive (i.e. ncurses vs slang)... so, maybe there are two, or three versions of the same package... and again, this sounds awfully good, except for the limited and volunteered time of a port maintainer. A happy compromise might be then to have binary packages of popular ports, which is how we have it now. Second, and I think this the most important reason, ports put the responsibility of the system on the user. They force you to make decisions on exactly what software is installed. You want the stability and freedom of FreeBSD without this responsibility, and this seems very hard to compromise (e.g., macosx and most linux distributions remove the responsibility by making all these choices for you). Is this newbie friendly? Probably not. Does it need to be? Well, it would be nice if more people use it, but if we remove the responsibility from the user, then it would not be FreeBSD, it would be something else. (Like Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, which sounds like what you are looking for.) -- Benjamin Tovar
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