Third-party software management under BSD

by Andrew Pantyukhin

Abstract

Third-party software management has long been the cornerstone of system administration of any Unix system. Modern BSD systems have developed elaborate ways to solve the problem through so called ports and packages, making thousands of programs readily available to end-users and administrators for seamless installation, deinstallation and upgrades.

As time passed, different infrastructural issues were met and overcome successfully through clever hacks or tactical decisions. Today with over 15000 ports in FreeBSD and other systems' collections growing at a steady pace we face new technical challenges ranging from scalability to manageability.

Centered on the FreeBSD ports infrastructure, this talk will also outline the ways of pkgsrc and OpenBSD ports and explore a possibility of synergistic cooperation between the projects. We'll see what might be borrowed from and given back to each system. We'll also have a thorough look at foreign solutions, such as Gentoo portage, Debian packages, SEPP, etc., to get an idea of where we might want the ports to go.

All in all, it will be a kind of extensive status report on where we stand with a long-term outlook for where we want to be.

Author bio

Andrew Pantyukhin has been contributing new ports since 2005 and became a FreeBSD ports committer in May 2006. He has since been working on infrastructural changes and keeping an eye out for any ideas which can make the ports system a better place as a whole. He's been a Unix administrator for years and recently started to teach FreeBSD every now and then

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