Solved Why Ports ? Why not only pkg ?

[richardtoohey2]

So the the FreeBSD ports system is a centralized place where all sources are hosted.

No, the source code for the ported applications will usually be hosted where-ever the author hosts that source code. e.g. might be github or sourceforge or whatever.

The ports system has instructions where to look for that source code, how to patch it (if necessary) to work on FreeBSD and how to build it.

The output of that build can be a package.

 

[Deleted member 30996]

I never installed a single app using ports.

I've used FreeBSD since 2005 and had never used pkg to build a desktop till last year.

PKG is a total disaster

I have some sympathy for Barney and experienced similar issues (with a non-EOL release) before reverting to compiling my own ports again with customized settings. I had been willing to forego some of the customisation for the supposed ease of updating, only to find the system was frequently...

forums.freebsd.org

Two reasons for that. The first reason is less powerful hardware. The second reason is I never understood the reason behind the creation of this ports system.

Less powerful than what? A Monster Truck? A Lenovo Thinkpad T61? With:
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7300 @ 2.0GHz
4GB PC2-5300 RAM
nVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M

I taught myself to use ports and the experience gained using them and solving problems that happen from time to time gave me valuable skills that can only be acquired from experience using them:

Completely Removing a package

Installed 14.2 on my laptop; now configuring. I decided to use "ports" exclusively after I had installed several "packages". I deleted the packages but it seems to me that doing so does not completely remove the package. I suspect that because when I subsequently installed the port version of...

forums.freebsd.org

I'm going to do a rewrite of my Beginners Tutorial to use pkg instead of ports. I was going to call this an Intermediate Guide, but that's not right. It takes more skill to use ports than pkg. The Beginners Guide is an Intermediate Guide. No, it's for people who have never used the command line.

What will I do? What will I do...

I mean when installing a package is a simple pkg install <package> why waste time in compiling ?

If I compare FreeBSD with popular GNU/Linux distros like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE of non these have ports. The only Linux distro that has ports is Gentoo.

So my question is why did the FreeBSD devs create this Ports system ?

Gentoo generally considered to take more skill than Debian, but Debian is now considered to be hard to use as FreeBSD by the people who used to complain about FreeBSD being hard to use. FreeBSD and Gentoo didn't get any easier to use and Debian didn't get any harder to use.

So what happened?

The people, who lived on a soft, fluffy pink cloud, high in the sky where apple pies fly, had a diet high in Gluten and succumbed to Smartphone Smarts Sucking Syndrome Simplex Six.