What does it mean to use ports?

[George Hartzell]

hw writes:
 > Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> writes:
 > [...]
 > The most time consuming part would be to learn and to decide about all
 > the options of all the packages to compile.  Doing that for just one
 > package like emacs might take weeks because there are so many
 > dependencies. [...]
 >
 > At some point in the process, it might not work out at all because I
 > picked options in contradiction to dependencies.  Setting up the tools
 > might be the smallest problem.

All of that is true, but awfully pessimistic.  Often things just work.
Other times you have to run down one or two chains of x begets y
begets z.

I think that learning to build your own things is a good exercise,
even if you switch back to pre-built packages.

g.