On Mon, 7 Feb 2005, Eric Boutilier wrote:

> In the world of open-source software (OSS) there are just a few
> "distros" that are source-based. The two major ones appear to be
> Portage (gentoo.org) and Pkgsrc (netbsd.org).

I don't wish to be rude here, as I'm a FreeBSD developer who just
monitors the list to stay informed, but ...

According to my latest statistics, the FreeBSD ports collection stands
at 12313 ports*, the majority of which are source-based (a few include
Linux RPMs that we run in compatibility mode; there are a scattered
number of other binary-only ports.)

Currently of the above number, we package up over 11000.  (A few
hundred cannot be packaged due to licensing restrictions; the others
have various build problems.)

This is not to say that the Ports Collection is either better or worse
than pkgsrc -- for one thing, they have different goals and methodologies.
(pkgsrc is branched and FreeBSD's tree isn't; FreeBSD runs on far fewer
architectures, although it does include sparc64.  Each of these allows
certain simplifications.)  The point of this post isn't really to belabor
any of the above -- but surely any survey of source-based applications
frameworks should include FreeBSD's work.

Mark Linimon
for the Ports Management team at FreeBSD.org :-)

* the FreeBSD terminology is: 'port' is the application framework
such as Makefiles; 'package' is the resulting binary.  This is as
opposed to the NetBSD meaning of 'port' as 'processor architecture'.