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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > What do you love about the BSDs?
 
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wolrah
May 8, 2006
what?

piss angel posted:

pkg is great but building from ports instead of using precompiled binaries can be advantageous in some scenarios

i don't need every single module that nginx ships with for example (support for webdav, mp4/flv etc) so it's nice to be able to just build in what i need as opposed to literally everything
A good binary distro offers multiple versions of packages people might commonly want to choose different options. To stick with your example of nginx, Ubuntu (and presumably Debian) offers five different versions of the package with varying sets of features compiled in and/or bundled as loadable modules. I usually use "nginx-light" which pretty much just gives me basic web server functionality plus FastCGI and Rewrite.

To me a good operating system should support building everything from source for the rare situations that you actually have a good reason to, but should not be designed to expect or even encourage that you actually do it for more than a few packages. Most users should never have to think about compiling anything.

wooger posted:

Debian has it's flaws, but being able to install a whole list of software in a few seconds with one command was a revelation 10 years ago, and pkg on FreeBSD still isn't close.
apt-get has only broken a couple of times in a decade for me.
Also "aptitude" is wonderful and I get angry at even other binary-based distros (like CentOS/RHEL) that don't have anything similar. For a dev box or personal bullshit machine where you might need to install a package without necessarily knowing exactly what you want it's a godsend.

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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > What do you love about the BSDs?