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FreeBSD provides two complementary technologies for installing third-party software: the FreeBSD Ports Collection, for installing from source, and packages, for installing from pre-built binaries
www.freebsd.org
If you choose Pkg to install binaries from a repository you don't need a ports-tree and therefore you dont't need Portsnap. If you ever need something like
INDEX-* in
/usr/ports/ you can fetch like this:
Code:
cd /usr/ports
fetch https://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/INDEX-12.bz2
bunzip2 INDEX-12.bz2
If you have an uptodate
INDEX-* you can do i.e.
pkg version vL=
without having a complete ports tree installed.
If you want to build from ports yourself and you do not like Portsnap, you can use Subversion instead.