I would *really* like to see a President who does. That way I don't have to live in fear of my freedoms anymore.
Well, $50 later, polaris (the FreeBSD box) is back up. It has a new power supply, and the old ISA soundcard was removed (since it was misbehaving, and causing kernel panics every few minutes). It has a fresh BSD install, which is currently getting my environment dumped onto it (zsh, bind, apache, postfix, courier, ...).
I have to say, I like BSD ports about as much as I like Gentoo's portage. They seem to have their own package-specific equivalent to USE flags, and better yet, I can pass it a PREFIX= option to prevent it from dumping everything in /usr/local (which rather pisses me off). Apps are now being installed into their various /opt trees, just as Jeebus intended. :-D
I'll probably have to do some rc script tweaking, but that doesn't bother me when compared to the flexibility of being able to dump things in /opt. The one disadvantage to placing things in their own /opt directories is that there is also an /opt/package/etc directory for each app. I would prefer all my configuration to be in a common location. Oh well. Maybe I'll fudge it with symlinks...haven't decided yet.
The other disadvantage is having to manage the PATH variable and the dynamic library loader. But I don't think those will be too much of a problem, either. Anyone who can't manage their PATH variable shouldn't be adminning a UNIX box anyhow. :)
-- Des
23:12:12 up 90 days, 16:44, 3 users, load average: 0.01, 0.02, 0.04