I would like to share my frustration here in fact hoping that someone can convince me that I am very wrong.

I've been trying some BSDs lately. Not for the first time, I did that around 2004 and gave up mostly because of poor hardware support. Being a Linux user is hard enough already. It's just reality, I know neither Linux nor the BSDs are to blame for that. Now I give it another go and run into things that just amaze me. To wit:

- The ports system. Who hasn't read or heard about how marvelous it is? I certainly have countless times, but I never cease to wonder what is so great about it. I downloaded and extracted OpenBSD's ports tarball and what did I find? 43 directories. 23,201 sub directories. 66,252 FILES! 161.2 Mb. So if I want to install, say, 4 or 5 applications that are not available as packages, I have to constantly maintain this PLAGUE of 66,252 files in my hard disk? Or delete and download it and extract it all over again in case I happen to need 1 or 2 additional applications from that catalog even if they add up to a couple of hundred kilobytes? Why does that strike me as unbelievably dumb and inefficient? What am I missing? Seriously, I am really looking for someone who can convince me that I am wrong.

- Dependency resolution. OK, I use Slackware so I am biased. But I'll bitch about it anyway. So the BSD community is like the Debian community: so proud of their dependency resolution system. But I just had this awful experience that reminded of 2002/2003, when I didn't know better and tried Debian:

I installed PC-BSD and wanted Yakuake. It is available at pbidir.com so I installed it. It doesn't work, it's incompatible. So I removed it and installed it with 'pkg_add -r'. Another version was delivered. Suddenly I see the command line inform me that it is downloading kde-base 3.5.9 because Yakuake requires it. But PC-BSD already has KDE 4! And kde-base is big! Nooooo!!!

Bottom line: 25 minutes to download and install something that would have cost me 30 seconds or 3 minutes tops in Slackware. And I also had to waste God knows how much disk space for having two versions of kde-base. Dang, if I wanted to put up with that kind of nuisance, I'd be using Debian.

- Encrypted file systems. That is important to me. BSD is so often sold as the ideal OS for security paranoids and I am one of them. We are therefore a perfect match. NOT. I have a 120 Gb /home directory (i.e. most of the disk) locked tight with dm-crypt. First off, I learn that encrypted file systems in OpenBSD are limited to 8Gb. Great Scott, Marty. Have I gone back in time? Oh, I see. These folks are so fond of SCSI disks and these are so expensive that the BSD people have to make do with tiny but affordable HDs. Sorry, bad joke. But 8Gb? Really? Then I investigate FreeBSD. GBDE. There doesn't seem to be any size limitations, but this Jonathan guy has a very interesting piece of advice to ye who enter here:

He really has got to be kidding. The integrity of my partition will depend on a file that resides in /etc, another file system? All my data is lost if I ever lose that extraneous file? And if I restore my backup, I have to introduce that file into the host system to make my encrypted partition work? You don't believe the guy? Neither did I, but official documentation confirms his information:

And there is also this:

You lose 5Gb to encrypt a 200Gb with GBDE? And the default is 15Gb??? Man, I don't lose anything at all with dm-crypt+LUKS!

Wait. But I tried these OSes. I saw their documentation. I read manuals, I booted the systems, I used them for a few days and they actually struck me as very high class systems. Now what is the deal with HD encryption in them? Why are they in the Stone Age like that? It just simply boggles my mind.

I know this post may seem inflamatory and offensive to many people, but I swear I am asking honest questions here. Some or all of the information I have quoted may be grossly incorrect. I think I am making it quite clear that I am not very familiar with the BSDs. I'll really appreciate it if someone takes the time and patience to explain why I am wrong and, hopefully, why I should change my mind. I really would like to change my mind. Although I don't have any pressing need to migrate or anything, the one thing I've always craved in computing is true widespread diversity - opposed to the current dominance of MS, Apple or Ubuntu. When I saw the degree of polish that has been put into PCBSD 7, I was excited! I thought that finally the BSDs are going to become a lot more interesting to a wider audience. But now I am not so sure. :-(

Thanks for listening.

So don't use them. Really, if running cvs up from time to time is soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo difficult, and you can't be bothered to backup a critical file to allow disk encryption, then nothing is going to make you happy. Go away and stop wasting people's time.

162MB, really? You have a 120GB drive. Just sit back and consider the utter silliness of your statement. I maintain the ports tree on several machines with 8GB drives.

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Feel free not to use any BSD.

Thanks.

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There is nothing constructive in your comment so you are wasting time, both yours and mine. I can't be accused of wasting anybody's time since I am not forcing anyone to read or answer. I only expect replies from people who are willing to share their wisdom by proving me wrong and/or find this discussion interesting in any way.

Oh, you edited your comment. A bit better now.

I expected some comment like that. In fact, the big HD has my everyday use Linux system. I installed the BSDs in a much smaller spare disk.

My 120Gb disk is not even filled. I have plenty of space left in it. But I was hoping I wouldn't have to get into such details because that is completely beside the point. The point is: the system is remarkably wasteful.

I already do. Thanks.

I didn't find your post inflammatory or offensive. You're not really asking "honest questions" to get help, though -- you're mostly venting based on some design decisions, some experiences, and some anecdotal evidence.

It sounds like you're a happy Slackware user. Stick with what works for you.

I confirm: I am venting.

But I also seek help in a way. I expect someone to say "You've been picking all you information from the wrong sources and taking very inaccurate conclusions. Of course xxxBSD offers a much better way to handle that, which is: ..."

See my point?

I can't speak to the quality of the information you've collected, and I don't question your ability as an adult to come to the conclusions that are correct for you.

I'm very much a FreeBSD advocate, but I am not selling it. If you want to join the party, and you're capable of reading and understanding a lot of documentation, and you are satisfied with the project's design decisions, welcome aboard. Otherwise, use whatever you'd like.

More to the point: If you have specific questions (that are not accompanied by a multi-paragraph rant), post them in another thread.

<disclaimer>
I use OpenBSD-CURRENT, so perhaps I'm biased as well...
</disclaimer>

Encrypted large filesystems:
openbsd-encrypted-nas-howto

Ports:
What's not to like? So you Cvsup or cvs update your ports tree (seriously, if you re-download the entire tree just for a few kb of changes, perhaps you should rethink *your* approach)...if you're following STABLE or CURRENT, you'll have to screw around with it, but if you follow RELEASE, you should never have to mess with updating your ports tree. I've scripted the entire CURRENT build (updating /usr/src, /usr/xenocara, /usr/ports, building kernel, userland, X, updating ports, etc...)...I mean seriously, it *isn't* that difficult. And 162 MB? Do you use OpenOffice? Complain much about OOo's disk space requirement?

The entire OS easily fits in under 500 MB (Hrmmm...Ubuntu requires, what? 2.5 GB?), so what's 162 MB of additional space?

OpenBSD is not a forgiving OS (trust me, I've found out the hard way on a few occasions). It doesn't take "maybe" for an answer. There is no "grey area". It's hardcore, and it's not designed to hold your hand. If you feel Slack gives you what you want/need, then by all means continue using Slack.

Edit - a quick comparison of "source-driven" ports systems (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Gentoo Linux) shows OpenBSD at 192 MB (CURRENT), FreeBSD at 385 MB (7.0-RELEASE), and Gentoo at 328 MB (Portage-Latest).

1 members found this post helpful.

I routinely install OpenBSD on USB flash drives for our firewalls and it takes around 420MB. Of course I don't install X or the ports tree on those.

I really can't get over someone griping about 162MB. That is a tiny price to pay to have most popular applications pre-configured to build properly on the OS and resolve dependancies, generally with a useable config file tailored specifically to the OS. Even a so-called "minimal" installation of most popular Linux distributions is going to be a couple of GB.

It's not so tiny and certainly not smart.

How about this: instead of keeping the entire tree, keep just ONE file with the name, MAYBE a very brief description and download location of each application. I imagine such file would be about 1 or 2Mb in size. Issue a command specifying the desired application and that application ONLY is downloaded and installed in the remaining usual ports way. You don't have to cd to the specific application's build dir (yeah, I'm lazy :-)) and it's less bandwidth cost for the servers/mirrors too. You could even batch the installation of many applications easily:

# portinstall vi pico mutt pine

or

# for i in vi pico mutt pine; do portinstall $i; done

A lot smarter IMO.

And what if the app you're building depends on another port? You'd have to go download that 1-2Mb file, too...and what if *that* one depends on yet another port?

Perhaps downloading the entire thing is the more efficient route...

Edit - One file for all ports...interesting, but:
That doesn't even touch configuring each port for your system...that's a whole new game. I guess if you want to screw around typing in specific commands to build it (rather than have a Makefile ready-made for you), then more power to ya. And I guess hashes (to ensure we're not compiling a corrupted download or maliciously tampered download) would be sacrificed, too, eh?

@lucmove

I will only spead for FreeBSD.

Ports system is great for building customized servers, many people will download plain tar.gz from for example php site to built this part of LAMP/FAMP but with ports you tweak 4-5 Makefiles with CONFIGURE_ARGS (which pass args to --configure) and do one make.

You can also set special CFLSGS for every port and so on and so on, tak a look at example /etc/make.conf from FreeBSD : http://toya.net.pl/~vermaden/text/make.conf

Updating FreeBSD Ports is very easy, portsnap fetch extract (for the first time) later updates only portsnap fetch update.

I do not see anything wrong with that, Portage is similar also (Portage is also based on FreeBSD Ports), it just works for me, similar as MacPorts, pkgsrc.org for example.

About dependency resolution, you can edit Makefiles to remove dependencies, but I did not tried that for packages/pkg_add.

I think that you should submit a bug, but at the same time, PCBSD uses pkg_add and Ports as optional package repositories, but mentioning that at forums.pcbsd.org will sure not hurt.

I would prefer GELI on FreeBSD, GELI uses passphrase which should be better option for you.

I also used Linux for long time (and still use at work) also Solaris, Mac OS X, NetBSD, ...

and I must admit that Linux is biggest mess of them all, kernel expecially, lack of documentation, lots of random solutions here and there, with useless ALSA comparing to crossplatform OSS4 and many other caveats that I do not accept about Linux, but if I have to use it, I prefer Gentoo/Arch.

You should read these about basic idea of FreeBSD as a concept:
http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd...bsd4linux1.php
http://www.cons.org/cracauer/freebsd.html

Regards
vermaden

1 members found this post helpful.

Isn't that exactly what pkg_add does, fetch dependencies on demand? Or do you download all possible existing packages so you never have to fecth them with the -r parameter? Why can't ports be handled in the same way? That would be a great disk space and bandwidth saver.

The ports system *does not contain the source code*. It contains Makefiles and other odds and ends that allow you to install the port from source without having to tweak the port over and over again...that work is already done. Why reinvent the wheel?

I am not saying it doesn't work, I'm saying it's like keeping a cow at home just so you can have a little milk once in a while.

I will definitely look into GELI. And thanks for the links.