Which Has The Best Package Control System 3978

nntp

Packages are just precompiled ports on FreeBSD. Any port you install is listed in the package database just as a binary package would be. pkginfo, pkgdelete work on installed ports. The only advantage to packages over ports is no wait on comiling. This can be great for things like openoffice, xorg, mozilla, etc. Ports, however, let you pick compile-time options like whether you want SSL support included in your application and other useful things that you cannot choose when installing binary packages.

Ports also does an excellent job of upgrading (make deinstall reinstall, or portupgrade tool) and keeping track of dependencies, old config files, etc.

I find FreeBSD package management to be elegantly simple, flexible, and time saving in my system administration experience. Unfortunately, I cannot really compare it to most linux package management tools, except to say that i greatly prefer it to RPM. No experience with deb's.

Gentoo's portage is like a clone of BSD ports trees, allowing linux users the same ability to quickly compile (well, quick time at keyboard, the compile may take a while) an app and all its dependencies on your local system without bothering to waste time on checking what order to install dependencies, what .-configure arguments are needed, etc. Gentoo users I've known seem pretty happy with it.

This is usually OS specific. Most package management systems will let you see what files were installed by a package. For instance, on FreeBSD, pkginfo -L packagename will list all files it installed. Some OS's put things in weird places likevar-httpand since almost any app's .-configure could have it install various components to different locations, one should find a way to check where things are installed on their system, and get a feel for the basic hier the package system uses.

On FreeBSD, for instance, I can expect by now that any package I install will put everything inusr-local (unless maybe qmail still tries var-qmail), I can expect config files inusr-local-etc, I can expect various shared stuff like vim syntax files inusr-local-share, I can expect a startup script for any daemon I install in usr-local-etc-rc.d-, etc. And if I can't find what I'm looking for, pkginfo -L comes to the rescue.

Lots of packages may be installed somewhere that's not in your path. Lots of packages will never need to be in the path, so long as startup scripts properly run the daemon.

Find out how to see the list of files a package installs, and you will never have to rely upon it being installed to your path to start using it right away.

No clue about Cent, but my redhat rpm experience was a headache.

aside from what i said about portage concepts above, i have no clue.