one of the problems with using ports as you describe is that the many dependencies that usually exist will rear their ugly heads as soon as your install has aged even a little bit. the problems you will run into are usually NOT problems with the port or freebsd. the ports work with the rest of the release when that release happens. but things are always changing and new things you install may have changes that were not in your release. the collection of files running in your release are gradually replaced, and conflicts with ports are inevitable. that is what poudrier is for, to give a static sandbox for builds, so you can attempt to keep the build environment the same over time.
personally I think the dynamic linking model is obsolete. we needed it back in the old days where a gigabit was a large number. if you statically link stuff, it will run more reliably because it is not calling out to a bunch of dynamic libraries that are subject to change. On Wed, May 7, 2025 at 4:06 PM John W <jwde...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I know that using binary packages is popular these days, and that poudriere > exists, too. But I still generally have been managing my ports via 'make > install' and/or portmaster (which uses the same, under the hood). > > > But I had a strange interaction in a bug report, recently [1], which makes me > wonder: is this old style of managing ports no longer well-supported? > > Quote from that link from bofh@: > > And to be frank for end users; ports is not the way to go. It's > binary pkgs or poudriere for your custom builds. If you want to try > ports/portmaster/portupgrade seek help from forums or mailing lists not > as a bug report. > > As far as I am able to tell, the behavior I described *is* a bug with that > port. But the fact that it manifests via 'make config' and soforth seemed > to be a reason for it to not be considered a bug? > > As I understand it, bofh@ is a senior FreeBSD person, so presumably they > know more about it than I do. But I could not find a way to make sense of > their response without the impression that make-based workflows are not > supported, these days. > > Just curious if anyone else has some high-level insights on this > situation. I've been using 'make install' for like 15+ years and it seems > weird to get this sort of response from ports maintainers. > > -John > > > [1] https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=286659#c4 >
