4.1. Why Have a Ports Collection?

The base FreeBSD system comes with a very wide range of tools and system utilities, but a lot of popular programs are not in the base system, for good reasons:-

1. Programs that some people cannot live without and other people cannot stand, such as a certain Lisp-based editor.
2. Programs which are too specialised to put in the base system (CAD, databases).
3. Programs which fall into the ``I must have a look at that when I get a spare minute'' category, rather than system-critical ones (some languages, perhaps).
4. Programs that are far too much fun to be supplied with a serious operating system like FreeBSD ;-)
5. However many programs you put in the base system, people will always want more, and a line has to be drawn somewhere (otherwise FreeBSD distributions would become absolutely enormous).

Obviously it would be unreasonable to expect everyone to port their favourite programs by hand (not to mention a tremendous amount of duplicated work), so the FreeBSD Project came up with an ingenious way of using standard tools that would automate the process.

Incidentally, this is an excellent illustration of how ``the Unix way'' works in practice by combining a set of simple but very flexible tools into something very powerful.