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FreeBSD is bundled with a rich collection of system tools as part of the base system. In addition, FreeBSD provides two complementary technologies for installing third-party software:
- the FreeBSD Ports Collection, for installing from source
- packages, for installing from pre-built binaries.
Either method may be used to install software from local media or from the network.
For more detailed information you can refer to Chapter 4. Installing Applications: Packages and Ports
While the two technologies are similar, packages and ports each have their own strengths. You should select the technology that meets your requirements for installing a particular application.
# What I prefer
My policy is to use pre-compiled binaries as much as possible to:
- avoid the need of tinkering with foreign source code and compiler options
- have easily reproducible build
- update more easily
- use more reliable and stable versions.
# Package (pkg) Benefits
- A compressed package tarball is typically smaller than the compressed tarball containing the source code for the application.
- Packages do not require compilation time. For large applications, such as Mozilla, KDE, or GNOME, this can be important on a slow system.
- Packages do not require any understanding of the process involved in compiling software on FreeBSD.
# Port Benefits
- Packages are normally compiled with conservative options because they have to run on the maximum number of systems. By compiling from the port, one can change the compilation options.
- Some applications have compile-time options relating to which features are installed. For example, Apache can be configured with a wide variety of different built-in options.
- In some cases, multiple packages will exist for the same application to specify certain settings. For example, Ghostscript is available as a ghostscript package and a ghostscript-nox11 package, depending on whether or not Xorg is installed. Creating multiple packages rapidly becomes impossible if an application has more than one or two different compile-time options.
- The licensing conditions of some software forbid binary distribution. Such software must be distributed as source code which must be compiled by the end-user.
- Some people do not trust binary distributions or prefer to read through source code in order to look for potential problems.
- Source code is needed in order to apply custom patches.