On Tue, 8 Feb 2005, Roman Kennke wrote:

> 1. Is FreeBSD equally well supported in pkgsrc as NetBSD is? My concern
> are security updates and unmaintained packages

It is not equally supported. It has less testing and fewer developers
with easy access to FreeBSD servers. Nevertheless, for many packages,
pkgsrc works great under FreeBSD. (I use it on FreeBSD.)

> 2. Are security updates delivered timely? Ok, no big deal if not, they
> are not always delivered timely in FreeBSD ports... ;-)

Whenever we hear of a new security advisory, we post about it to an
internal list. Usually security fixes are done within a few days, and
sometimes on the same day.

As for the stable branch, this may take longer, because we sometimes have
to create patches specific for the fix versus updating the software to
keep the branch stable.

> 3. What is the best method for updating without breaking stuff? Make
> update? pkg_comp? probably something else?

I use a different package build machine myself. Others use a chroot jail.

> 4. Are there performance differences between ports compiled and pkgsrc
> compiled packages?

I am not sure.

> 5. Are there other caveats in a setup like this? Any recommendations?
>
> Thank you in advance!
>
> BTW: I would rather completely go with NetBSD on this machine, but I am
> some hundred kilometers aways from it and only have a SSH connection, so
> this does not seem easy to accomplish. And yes, I activly use
> NetBSD/pkgsrc on 2 boxes at home.

Converting to NetBSD remotely seems like an interesting task. Maybe make
it boot or chroot to some memory file system and then reset up the disk
from there ...


 Jeremy C. Reed

 	  	 	 technical support & remote administration
	  	 	 http://www.pugetsoundtechnology.com/