Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years
That's a good overall article - I've been switching back and forth between FreeBSD and Debian for several years now, and I never spend more than a couple of month without using one of them.<p>The one thing that surprised me was his take on FreeBSD's package management system, pkg.  PKG is relatively new, having been released in late summer 2012. Prior to that, FreeBSD relied on the ports collection, which was (is) a vast tree of Makefile's allowing you to create custom builds of virtually any software imaginable.<p>While pkg is still raw on the edges, I VASTLY prefer it to Debian's hodgepodge of package management tools that all do 90% of the other, though none of them do it cleanly and none of them have straightforward interfaces.  Am I using dpkg here?  What about aptitude?  Or should I just roll w/ apt-get?  All of these tools combine the ease of use of git with the flexibility of a Maven build.  If you know how to use to descend deep into the depths of git or Maven, this isn't an issue ( and for the author, it certainly is not ).  Yet there are numerous simple tasks ( like say, searching for a package remotely when you aren't sure the exact name ) which still require hitting up google and settling in for a Click-Your-Way-To-Adventure session.<p>PKG, in contrast, is both simplistic and flexible ( it reminds me of a industrial grade version of Brew in some sense ).  It's a tool that I find myself integrating into my workflow beyond simple installs / updates, particularly it's seamless integration with jails.  Configuration of remote repositories is vastly simplified as well.<p>PKG is not perfect by an means - it definitely has worts that need to be taken care of.  I'm also sure that PKG probably feels a tad inadequte to some hard core sys admins - pkg has the look and feel of a tool designed by a programmer looking to handle normal cases than a tool designed to provide a sys admin with an atom bomb if necessary.  Yet the system is still relatively new and as the bugs continue to get ironed out it's a reminder to me of why I love FreeBSD in a lot of ways - the abstraction point is flawless and it gets out of my way.