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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

I love openBSD, it's implementation of certain things is slower (like networking), but it's so clean and well implemented.

even if it doesnt' get to play with all the toys (like ZFS) it's what I'd love to default to for application servers/bastion server/firewalls etc;

my only qualm with it currently is it's reliance of X11 for ports to work- I don't like install X11 libs on my servers wherever I can avoid it. :\

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> my only qualm with it currently is it's reliance of X11 for ports to work- I don't like install X11 libs on my servers wherever I can avoid it. :\

Can you give a reference to this? I'm not doubting you, as I always install x11 anyway, I just didn't know this was still the case. I remember an issue with a lib in xbase.tgz a few years back that was required by lots of ports, but I thought they moved it to base.tgz.

Thanks!

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.ports/54692

http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq15.html#NoFun (at the bottom of this section)

Good call. I was thinking packages in my head despite you specifically referring to ports. Thanks for following up!

To be fair I have this problem on Debian too. Sometimes there is foo-nox, the foo version without X dependencies, but I seem to find myself building such packages for myself to omit some afterthought GUI bit which drags in Qt, gtk, or half of the gnome universe for no reason.

At least with packages, there are "no-X" versions of most packages available (useful if you don't have X on a machine).

the problem isn't that it's dependant for X11 on packages.. moreso that the port system requires X11 to function..

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.ports/54692

http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq15.html#NoFun (at the bottom of this section)

Ah, I see.

My point about packages still stands, though; I don't use ports on my OpenBSD servers (since it's much easier on server load to just download/install a package than to try to build things from source; well, that and the lack of a need to install a whole lot on an OpenBSD server besides a runtime for $SERVER_PROGRAMMING_LANGUAGE, but whatever). I suppose if you're particularly paranoid about downloading things from the internet, you could build packages on your personal workstation with the necessary env vars to disable X11 support in the package, then move those packages over to the server and install them there (basically, doing what OpenBSD's ports/packages maintainers already do in order to create the packages in the first place, but on your own).

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