DragonFly 3.4 released!

Justin Sherrill justin at shiningsilence.com
Wed May 1 12:05:34 PDT 2013


People are so used to BSD ports == building from source that it's
going to take a while to disabuse them of the notion, I bet.  The
Slashdot post on the 3.4 release (for instance) had a number of people
blithely going on about building from source and so on.

On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 12:42 PM, John Marino <dragonflybsd at marino.st> wrote:
> On 4/30/2013 06:24, Justin Sherrill wrote:
>>
>> Version 3.4 of DragonFly is officially out.
>> If you are planning to try the new dports system for installing
>> third-party software, check the DPorts Howto page:
>>
>> http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/howtos/HowToDPorts/
>
>
> I've been reading a lot of the response to DPorts on the various outlets,
> and there's a common misconception that users are expected to build software
> from source.
>
> We definitely should have mentioned in the release announcement and the
> HowTo that there are over 19,600 pre-built binary packages available for
> both the i386 and x86_64 platforms for the 3.4 release (A greater than
> 10,000 package increase over pkgsrc when you removed multiversion
> duplicates).
>
> In fact, building from source is the exception.  I expect the vast majority
> of users to only use pre-built binaries.  The delivery *is* very apt-like
> thanks to the hard work Baptiste and others have done making pkgng a
> top-notch tool.  It's humorous and sad (simultaneously) that the criticism
> that DragonFly has received on their package situation is untrue.
>
> It's a lessons-learned for the next release: Publish the number of pre-built
> packages so that it's clear it's not a "compile your own software for two
> days" situation.  Pkgsrc pre-built package numbers need to get published
> too.
>
> John



More information about the Kernel mailing list