Can I use a port/package from one BSD on another?
reddit / BSD

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castlehq · 2020-05-17 09:42

I'm totally new to BSD world, but I know a bit of Linux. My question
is if can I use a package from NetBSD on GhostBSD?

I noticed that NetBSD has the latest LibreOffice package, while
GhostBSD doesn't. So, can I just install LibreOffice from NetBSD on my
GhostBSD?

Are packages interchangeable among BSD systems?

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Follpvosten · 2020-05-17 09:51

Short answer: No.

Longer, more correct answer: NetBSD specifically has a portable build
system in pkgsrc, which works on a multitude of operating systems,
including many BSDs, as well as Linux, macOS and even Windows. So you
can technically use NetBSDs build system on your OS in any case. But
you'd likely not want to build something like LibreOffice from source,
as that would take ages - so what you want is a binary package, and I
doubt that there's a build of that for your specific OS available.
To summarize, you'll have to wait or build from source using pkgsrc.

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castlehq · 2020-05-17 10:02

Clear, thanks!

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qci · 2020-05-17 10:31

LibreOffice build takes 27 minutes on FreeBSD (i7-3770K 16 GB RAM).

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Kernigh · 2020-05-17 21:13

If you use pkgsrc to build LibreOffice, you must also use pkgsrc to
build several packages that are build or run dependencies of
LibreOffice. pkgsrc doesn't see FreeBSD or GhostBSD packages but would
build pkgsrc packages of the same libraries and tools.

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[deleted] · 2020-05-20 00:52

You can't just run a NetBSD binary package on a FreeBSD-based system.

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laffer1 · 2020-05-26 17:33

As others have pointed out, you can't typically run binaries across
different BSDs. There are exceptions.  It's possible to run old
binaries from FreeBSD on MidnightBSD or possibly really old OpenBSD
binaries on MirBSD.   Usually there is some backward compatibility.
DragonFly might be able to run FreeBSD 4.x binaries also.

However, each project has its own kernel and most have their own
package managers.  I think dragonfly started using freebsd pkg more
recently.


So you have a binary compatibility issue and then also the package
format might not be compatible. They're all typically tarballs but any
scripts or metadata will differ.   For instance, freebsd pkg is file
based but midnightbsd uses sqlite3 files for plist/script info.