# FreeBSD ports are more up to date



## drhowarddrfine (Jul 12, 2017)

Co-worker sent this to me. It shows FreeBSD has the most up to date and least outdated packages in repositories of operating systems.


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## azathoth (Jul 18, 2017)

until you discover archlinux


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## Datapanic (Jul 18, 2017)

azathoth said:


> until you discover archlinux



Actually, Arch is in the list, you just have to scroll down a bit


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## drhowarddrfine (Jul 18, 2017)

azathoth Scroll down farther. You'll find Arch somewhere about 20 or 30 places down.


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## azathoth (Jul 19, 2017)

Datapanic said:


> Actually, Arch is in the list, you just have to scroll down a bit


Ive run both and Arch was ahead of freebsd in stable binary versions.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jul 19, 2017)

azathoth said:


> Ive run both and Arch was ahead of freebsd in stable binary versions.


Obviously, from the chart, that's not true by a long shot.


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## ANOKNUSA (Jul 19, 2017)

If I'm not mistaken, the table ranks systems based on the ratio of up-to-date to outdated packages, measured against the total number of packages in the repository. Arch is lower on the list because despite being a rolling-release distribution, the number of officially supported packages is extremely small relative to other Linux distributions. FreeBSD is at the top because its repo is a rolling-release platform _and_ has an enormous number of packages. It's both larger than the official Arch repo, and better-maintained that the AUR (not that that last point counts for much.  )


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## ShelLuser (Jul 20, 2017)

Statistics are meaningless without a clear explanation on what was measured, and how.

What defines "Outdated" for example? What defines "Unique"?

I looked at the main site where I came across (I quote):



> Repology shows you in which repositories a given project is packaged, which version is the latest and which needs updating, who maintains the package, and other related information.


Which needs updating? According to who?

See: my gripe with this is simple: a package like NetHack has 'recently' been updated, but before that it didn't get any updates for over 3+ _years_ (I don't know the exact time period from mind). Unless this site clearly tells us that "needs updating" means "there's a new version out but not available in the repository" I'm not going to assume anything here. For all I know they could even have been including NetHack as "needs updating".

Oh... would you look at this...  (note: all valid _at time of writing_):

Lets take a look at the repology NetHack stats. Oh dear: AUR is heavily outdated according to them. They use version
3.6.0.r728.gf715224 while a newer one is out. Yet when I search the AUR repository index for NetHack it clearly shows me the availability of 3.6.0.r728.gf715224-1.

Repology's list of outdated packages is outdated 

Very trustworthy indeed 

(edit):

Seems this is a structural problem...  According to Repology Fedora 24 and 25 still use the highly outdated NetHack version 3.4.3. When I check Fedora's package index on NetHack however it shows me something different once again: versions 24, 25 and 26 all use a 3.6.0 version. Most definitely _not_ 3.4.3.

Can it get worse? But of course it can. If I dig deeper for the "outdated" Fedora 24 release of NetHack I noticed that it had been upgraded to NetHack 3.6.0 almost a month ago (time of writing).

SO basically... This "awesomely trustworthy" Repology site is outdated by nearly 1 month when it comes to Fedora's repository entry of NetHack.

And this was done without even taking any effort. I can only shudder at what more nonsense I'll find if I dig deeper.

My conclusion: this website is hardly credible nor trustworthy. Best to ignore this one.


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## amdmi3@ (Jul 20, 2017)

ShelLuser said:


> Lets take a look at the repology NetHack stats. Oh dear: AUR is heavily outdated according to them. They use version
> 3.6.0.r728.gf715224 while a newer one is out. Yet when I search the AUR repository index for NetHack it clearly shows me the availability of 3.6.0.r728.gf715224-1.
> 
> Repology's list of outdated packages is outdated


Repology drops revision suffixes, "-1" in this case, as they are useless to it. If you've looked at packages page, you'll see the unmodified version. So you are wrong, it is not outdated.



ShelLuser said:


> Seems this is a structural problem...  According to Repology Fedora 24 and 25 still use the highly outdated NetHack version 3.4.3. When I check Fedora's package index on NetHack however it shows me something different once again: versions 24, 25 and 26 all use a 3.6.0 version. Most definitely _not_ 3.4.3.


Repology just didn't know of Fedora updates repositories. It does now. And it doesn't change the whole picture at all.



ShelLuser said:


> My conclusion: this website is hardly credible nor trustworthy. Best to ignore this one.


You cannot make any conclusions based on examining a single sample out of 126700.


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## ShelLuser (Jul 20, 2017)

amdmi3@ said:


> You cannot make any conclusions based on examining a single sample out of 126700.


I just did 

(edit)

Quantity does not make quality in my book.


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