A.k.a. "BSD ports collection". The ports collection is a list of programs ported to run on
FreeBSD,
OpenBSD, or any
Unix that supports it. It's a directory that lives under /usr/ports, and through magic
makefile tricks, lets you install many diverse applications, even downloading them and building them for you. Some say this approach is even better than the
RPM,
DEB,
SLP,
TGZ, etc. that we put up with in the
Linux world. Usually, building something in ports involves, "cd /usr/ports/application; make; make install", and then you are done. I give
extra credit to the
BSD guys for this one.
PS (li wanted me to add this.) The
ports collection is said by many to be superior to
Linux packaging schemes for a few reasons.
- Builds from source - a lot of people don't like running others binaries
- Central control over the packages - a lot of people are paranoid about getting RPMs and their ilk from here and there, and prefer to get them from one place. These are the same nuts that keep an MD5 checksum of every binary on the box.
- Easy to upgrade - when wish to upgrade, just "cd" into the directory and do "make install", and bada-bing, it is done.
- Easy to update - you can just cvsup your ports collection overnight
Blah, I hope I got them all.