tant, 10 months ago

@ms second try.
First we got FreeBSD ports where you would run make install clean and it did all the downloading, compiling and copying for you.
NetBSD forked the ports and named it pksrc.
OpenBSD also forked from FreeBSD.
The user interface for ports is still just make install clean for all BSDs.

pkg_* was added in FreeBSD 2 and again adopted by NetBSD and OpenBSD.
FreeBSD 10 then change to pkgng.

The major difference here is that FreeBSD supported packages early on.

ms, 10 months ago

@tant This is exactly what I wanted to know. I knew there needs to be a history behind it :-)

Thank you!

tykling, 10 months ago

@ms they are different operating systems, they share very little apart from the name

tant, 10 months ago

@ms packages are a sensitive issue. See Linux distros as a reference. :mastolol:

dcodejams, 10 months ago

@ms it's certainly possible - NetBSD's #pkgsrc does work on many other operating systems, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Linux.

josephholsten, 10 months ago

@ms In many ways, the package manager is the real operating system. You can run on different filesystems, with different device drivers, different process schedulers and memory management systems, still call it the same operating system. Even FreeBSD on ARM lacks some of the syscalls that it supports on x86. What makes it FreeBSD is the software in the base system, pkgng & ports.
Cf #illumos, where you have different systems with sysv pkg*, solaris ips, netbsd pkgsrc, even debian apt.