Edit: I was wrong about OpenBSD ports on several counts, it seems. OpenBSD seems to have corrected several omissions in package management that I've seen in the past; some of these changes seem to have come recently, in version 5.5. I'm reading docs now to see which of these issues have been resolved.<p>Lest anyone be misled into believing ports is comparable to yum or apt...it is not.<p>With ports it is not only possible, but likely, that you will end up with upgrades to some software that can break other pieces of your system, because the dependencies often do not account for things, like compile flags, which can be changed by the user at install time. This leads to a very fragile system a couple years down the road, after a bunch of upgrades and new software installation has occurred. This isn't theoretical; I've seen it happen more often than not in my very limited use of the ports system...it is avoidable, but it is not obvious or well-documented how to avoid it, and adds not insignificant costs to maintaining your systems.<p>With ports it is not possible to verify that the files installed by the port match what was originally installed. This can be useful for security purposes (i.e. has the ps command been tampered with?) or for troubleshooting purposes (i.e. did someone install a program from a source tarball over the original package, or did permissions/ownership change?). <i>Edit: I was wrong on this one. pkg_check verifies package contents against checksums, which is comparable to rpm -V or debsums.</i><p>With ports, it is not possible to reliably roll-back to a prior version in-place (i.e. without uninstalling everything, and then reinstalling it).<p>With ports, it is likely you will, over time, end up with multiple versions of some things (libraries, languages, etc.) installed. This is common on Linux, as well, but the ability to determine what is built against which versions, and to be able to keep up with whether, say, an insecure version can be removed without breaking things on the system, is much weaker (non-existent, as far as I can tell).<p>OpenBSD has many fine qualities and very smart people working on it, and I don't think it's the dumbest idea ever to use it. But, ports is simply not a sufficient answer to the package management problem. RPM/yum and dpkg/apt are not perfect, but they are vastly superior to ports in every dimension. FreeBSD now has pkgng which is very much a move in the right direction, and it would be definite progress for OpenBSD to adopt it.<p>Note that providing binaries or not is not on my list of complaints about ports, above. Somehow, in every conversation about ports failings as a package manager, there will always be people talking about binaries, and how you can totally install binaries with ports and so there's no reason to not like ports. I find it annoyingly time-consuming to build everything from scratch, but it's not a deal-breaker. Providing binary packages is not why apt and yum are vastly superior to ports.