> For example, installing a pkg non-interactively may fail, but return success. Or, it may return failure, but the package actually installed successfully.

News to me. Should I just take your word for it?

> There had been a bug about it in the FreeBSD tracker about it for a couple of years when I ran into it...I don't know if it's been fixed by now. This was during the 7.0 release cycle.

Do you have a link to that?

Anyway, bugs happen. For instance, some RPM signing functionality is broken [1]. There's also the fact that killing a simple yum info command can leave the rpmdb in an inconsistent state [2] -- and I'd call that a "really scary quirk" if it wasn't just a bug. Should I claim these are some kind of inherent failings of RPMs compared to FreeBSD ports, the way you claimed a bug was some kind of inherent failing of the FreeBSD ports system?

> I've already mentioned the dependency issues I've run into.

I've run into dependency issues with DEB and RPM based tools, too.

> And, at the end of it all, the user can run "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade" and our packages get updated along with everything else.

I asked around. It is absolutely possible to set up a third-party repository for FreeBSD ports. If you want to, you can even set up a second, completely separate ports tree, and a handful of lines of sh script can be used to as a wrapper around your ports management tool of choice to automate the process of selecting a ports tree from which to get what you need to manage a particular port if it isn't in the default tree -- if that's the route you want to take. I poked around in manpages for about three minutes before coming up with the basics for such a system, then decided before putting more effort into it to ask on the freebsd-questions list whether a third-party ports source could be used with standard ports management tools; the first response gave me an idea how to do this, and it pointed to exactly the sort of thing I had found in my manpage browsing.

Hire someone who uses (and likes) FreeBSD if you're having that much trouble finding what took me about three minutes to find.

> And, we have a nice UI in the product itself that can query the native package manager to display a list of available updates and such.

Getting that information out of the ports tree is trivial.

> I found pkg_info during my Trail of FreeBSD Tears, but I don't believe it tells you about the configuration of the installed port, does it? I don't remember exactly what information I needed and couldn't get, as it's been a couple of years since I was banging on it seriously, but I do recall there were details I couldn't get making it difficult to figure out the actual state of the system.

Well, sorry -- I can't tell you how to find something if you don't know what you need to find. I suspect it's there to be found, though, if it's not completely unreasonable.

> I hate our current distribution and installation process on FreeBSD, and having the ability to use native packages with native update mechanisms would be great.

I'd recommend starting with references to environment variables in the pkgtools.conf file if you want to get where I was going in short order. You can also get some hints from this response to my freebsd-questions query [3]. He talked a little more about mirroring than I had intended with my question, but a lot of the information is very generalizable.

> I want less. I want One True Package Manager on the system and I want it to be able to manage and update all the packages. Adding more software to an already large stack is exactly the opposite of what I want to do.

Admirable.

> yum/rpm makes this trivially easy. apt-get makes it reasonably easy. FreeBSD makes it pretty much impossible as far as I can tell. But, hey, if you get it figured out, I'd be more than happy to be wrong. Supporting FreeBSD has been a pain in my ass for years now, and it'll continue to be so as long as installation is such a mess.

If you're still having problems with this a year from now, you could always check back with me and see if my curiosity has driven me to look into it enough to write up a howto (or to find and test any that might have been written by others, since that would probably be preferable to duplicating effort).

> our FreeBSD users tend to be better educated about their systems than our CentOS users, on average; which makes sense, given that CentOS is the "standard" in hosting, and you'd have to go seek out FreeBSD

Have you considered throwing the question to your FreeBSD users to see if they can offer any help or suggestions to make things easier for themselves?

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edit:

I don't know how long I'll be able to keep up with this discussion here. I'm not entirely clear on how long HN keeps comments open, and the interface for my comments list makes it difficult to keep up with older discussions. If you need to keep in further touch, try my contact page at blogstrapping [4].

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notes:

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=624585

[2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=557741

[3] http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2010-Oc...

[4] http://blogstrapping.com