Introduction to Ports
We've now covered the packages and the tools FreeBSD provides for interacting with them. However, this is where it really gets fun. Welcome to the FreeBSD ports.
As convenient as packages are, the traditional “UNIX way” of installing new software has always been to compile it yourself. The administrator finds the distribution site (either HTTP or FTP—or in earlier eras, tools such as gopher or archie), downloads the source code bundled up in a .tar.gz or .tgz file, and unpacks it into some temporary directory. He then reads the various README files for special instructions, and usually then runs a configure script that examines the system to check for numerous different function calls (because these calls vary from platform ...
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