whats the benifit of compiling a program on bsd or any type of unix os
rather than getting a executable

Well in general, the benefit of compiling versuses getting a binary (by the way, all executables are not necessarily binary data, and all binary files are not necessarily exectuable) is that it will be more customized to it's environment. There might be special compiler options used by the compiler on your machine to work better with your OS/achitecture than just accepting a generic binary that is compatible.

In practice, there's usually very little difference. I've heard that benchmarks of Gentoo (a "compiling everything from source" OS) are little different than those of Debian (install from binary packages), and in some cases even worse.

If the defaults of the package are acceptable, it's probably easier to install from package. If you want to change the defaults, then you probably need to build from source. The *BSDs (well, Free|Net|Open) all have the package/ports system where you can build software from source, using predefined rules (the ports system). You can pass arguments to make in order to make changes from the default behavior.

The other benefit to using the ports system: Dependencies. If you keep your ports up to date (quite easy with cvsup and portupgrade), you have very few issues installing from ports and you don't have to find depencies, it will download and install any dependency you have for a given app.

yeah i heard about gentoo but it takes for ever to compile stuff....
i think bsd is kool though.......thanks a lot guys

There is a lot more than time that is important to think about. A good, managed, and updated ports system means you compile your apps based on your system (if you set the right flags in make.conf - and compile your own kernel - which is very easy to do in FreeBSD.) and also it handles how and where your applications are installed (you can always install using your own prefix). So when you go to uninstall or update, it knows where eveything is in a ports db.

The other thing is FreeBSD also has a package system for precompiled binaries. You can install them during OS installation and update them as easily as the ports system. But imo installing from ports is one quick way of installing apps ( I never ran into anything that took very long, unless it had a lot of dependencies and it was a fresh install.).

I personally would install source over a package, doesn't take much to type: make install clean and walk away for a little bit, or surf the net.

People keep talking about the ports system as being a FreeBSD-only thing, but OpenBSD and NetBSD have it too!

I choose to build everything from ports on my OpenBSD and FreeBSD systems. For OpenBSD I have multiple boxen, so I build the port on one box and use the binary package to install on the others (the package that was built when I ran make in the ports system).

True, I have never used OpenBSD or NetBSD yet. So I think of FreeBSD when thinking ports =)