The truth about Apple fanboys/fangirls!

[Tsuroerusu]

I was listening to the last bsd podcast (BSD Talk 141) and it sounds like something new is on the horizon. I do not know anything about linux or bsd, but it seems like they used a different name for the supposedly new or updated package manager..

That's PC-BSD specifically. Let me explain. Historically, there's been three "main" BSD systems are FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. A few days ago, DragonFly BSD forked from FreeBSD, because of disagreements over how to do SMP and clustering. All four of those use a system called ports, which is like a Makefile-infrastructure with a BDB database at the back. So for instance, to install Apache using ports, you'd do this: cd /usr/ports/www/apache22 && make install clean
That will go out fetch the source code for Apache and all of it's dependencies, extract them, apply any patches that might be required or optimal to make it run good on FreeBSD, compile it and install it. If this sounds familiar, I can inform you that this is where Gentoo got their inspiration from.
NetBSD has something that uses the same general concept, called pkgsrc, short for package source, but it's implemented somewhat differently from what I hear. OpenBSD's ports system was originally a fork from FreeBSD's ports system, but it's diverged quite a bit since then. DragonFly BSD uses NetBSD's pkgsrc, as that, like NetBSD itself, is cross-platform, you could use it on GNU/Linux, Solaris, HP-UX and other platforms if you wanted to.
PC-BSD and DesktopBSD are what you might call, distributions of FreeBSD, targeting desktop use. PC-BSD was started with the philosophy of creating a package manager similar to the system that Mac OS X has where an application includes it's own copy of all of it's dependencies. So if you had two web browsers with SSL, they would both include their copy of SSL, with the aim of eliminating the issue of having dependencies at all, which would in theory, make things easier for people coming from a Windows environment. DesktopBSD has developed a GUI frontend for the standard FreeBSD ports system, rather than an entirely new package manager like PC-BSD's PBI system.

I don't mean to nitpick, but it's somewhat of a mistake to say "Now that bsd has a better way to install apps", because first of all, which BSD are you talking about? The three major ones are quite different, and I can guarantee you that OpenBSD would shun, like Amish people, the PBI system that PC-BSD has, you don't even want to suggest it to them, oh man a nuclear flamewar one would be starting!

[davijordan]

Thanx for the info. I did not mean to ruffle any feathers either, I must have misunderstood them when they sort of intimated that pbi would be bsd wide. I have a turnkey install of freenas on an old pc raid box and still have on g3 tower with osx 10.4, but I never have looked under the hood so to speak.

[Tsuroerusu]

Thanx for the info.

No problem.

I did not mean to ruffle any feathers either, I must have misunderstood them when they sort of intimated that pbi would be bsd wide.

I listened to the interview about 15 hours ago, and I did notice something in this area as well, so I can see where the confusion would have been.

I have a turnkey install of freenas on an old pc raid box and still have on g3 tower with osx 10.4, but I never have looked under the hood so to speak.

Well, even though Mac OS X is built using BSD as the foundation, you will still notice a huge difference. First of all, the kernel running is a Mach micro kernel, it's not the FreeBSD kernel (Which is a monolithic kernel). Also the ports system is obviously not supported on Mac OS X etc. etc. all the things you normally associate with BSD are somewhat different, as far as I know. Although you do have all your traditional commandline tools and stuff like that.
If you like tinkering, I'd highly recommend screwing around with the BSDs, it's a lot of fun, and I have learned a lot from doing it, it's just awesome, free software in general is just really kick-ass!