The Ports and Packages System

Ports are a mechanism for reproducibly and consistently building software on OpenBSD. Packages are precompiled ports for a specific OpenBSD version and platform. Packages install quickly and easily, and are recommended by the OpenBSD folks. Installing from a port takes more time and effort, but can be customized for your environment or server.

The basic idea behind the ports system is that if source code must be modified or tweaked to build or run on OpenBSD, the modification process should be automated. If you need other software to build this program from source code or run it, those dependencies should be automatically used. If you record exactly which files the software installs, you can easily uninstall it. ...

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