BSD Package Management talk
		By Avleen Vig
		Presented to UUASC (http://www.uuasc.org/)
		    on Feb 6th 2003
		==========================================


My operating system choice is being dictated by factors which shouldn't
effect it. The most notable of these is my choice of method of
installing applications.

There are days when I love installing servers really really fast.
I love Debian for this, and their apt-get system. It makes it so easy
for me to install publically availible binaries, or my own private ones
quickly.

But then there are some days I like to take my time, and pay special
attention to a server, and compile software from tarballs, applying my
own server-specific customisations for that extra *kick*.

Until I met the BSD pkg system, combining these two into a reliable
package management system was difficult.
When I talk about the package management system tonight, I'll primarily
be refering the the FreeBSD version, although commands across each of
the BSD are equivilent and the process is almost identical.

The key I feel, to a good package management system, is one that allows
the administrator to install a package any way he chooses, be it
precompiled or from source, and still allow easy maintainance of the
package once it is installed.

FreeBSD has two distinct parts to its package management system,
although at times they work closely with each other.
The first part we'll be discussing tonight is the Ports Collection,
which is located on FreeBSD under /usr/ports.
The ports collection is a heirarchy of directories, organised into
obvious catagories such as "Mail", "Net" or "Security".
Inside each of these catagory directories, are the directories of each
package or port. Finally, inside these subdirectories are the makefiles
which are used to fetch, compile and install the programs.
The process of installation through ports is very simple. CD to the
directory of the program you want to install, then run 'make' with the
options of your choice. Valid important options for make are:
   <no option> - This fetches the tarball and compiles the source
   fetch       - This only fetches the tarball
   fetch-list  - Show a list of files to fetch
   fetch-recursive      - Fetch files recursively
   fetch-recursive-list - List files to be fetched recursively
   extract     - This does fetch and extracts the tarball
   patch       - This does fetch, extract and patches the source for
                 freebsd-specific patches aswell
   configure   - This does fetch, extract, patch and runs 'configure'
   install     - This does fetch, extract, patch, configure and install
                 the program
   reinstall   - Reinstall a program, the same way as it was before
   clean       - This removes the source code
   distclean   - This removes the rouce code and the tarball
   deinstall   - Deinstall a program

There are many more options that we can use with 'make', that was just a
short list of the importand ones :-)
In the list, where we mention doing things "recursively", 'make' will
perform the action on all dependancies of the package you're trying to
install. This is the default behaviour.
When you execute 'make' you can specify multiple options on the
command-line such as 'make fetch checksum extract patch configure build'
You can also specify 'make install', which performs all 'make' functions
required for the 'install' to complete.


The second method of installation, which fetches and installed
precompiled binaries, is even simpler, where you only really need to
know two commands to get by:
    pkg_add <filename>
    pkg_deinstall <package name>
Specifying the '-r' flag to pkg_add, makes pkg download the correct
files for the package name you give, from ftp.freebsd.org and install
them.


Managing the collection is easy too! The only relevent command I think
you would need to know is:
    pkg_info
Applying different switches to this, displays the pkg's installed,
displays the files for the pkgs, calculates the size of the pkgs, and
can even show the install and deinstall scripts associated with each
pkg!


In all, this gives managing packages on BSD the beauty of compiling from
source with all the options thus related, along with the simplicity of
installing packages from precompiled binaries for the ultra-fast
installs.