The ports-system and userland in general.

[Michel Talon]

Weapon of Mass Deduction wrote:

> I never used the Gentoo portage system, but of course I know it and have
> seen it work. I can't, however, think of anything about it that would be
> superior to the FreeBSD ports system, and certainly not to the
> (original) NetBSD pkgsrc system. 

The dragonfly people have a lot of nice ideas about package management,
but there is one fact that is essential to remember: the *most* essential
feature of a package system is to have a lot of ports, and preferably
prebuilt packages also. In this domain, FreeBSD and Debian Linux (*) play
in the champion's league, with more than 10 000 ports, when all others,
including commercial Linux distributions (Redhat and other crap), NetBSD
and even more OpenBSD play small game.
Many people will need that obscure package that
you don't even know exists, and will be happy to find it for Debian
unstable and FreeBSD. Basically everything that exists can be found for
these two systems, and this is a formidable asset, much more important that
any super ingenious performance tweaking in the kernel for many users.
It would be nice for dragonfly to capitalize on this success rather than
embarking on a completely orthogonal project and be rewarded with a ports
tree with 3000 ports.

(*) which explains that when you consider all Debian derivatives, Knoppix,
Kanotix, Mepis, Ubuntu, and all others, they vastly outnumber any other
Linux distros at least on distrowatch popularity index.





-- 
Michel Talon