synth

Next D/Ports build tool for live systems (Alternative for Portmaster and Portupgrade tools)

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3Distinct people

4Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

275GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

Next D/Ports build tool for live systems (Alternative for Portmaster and Portupgrade tools)

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year4 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-05-31 07:08:37 UTC to 2021-09-11 04:56:11 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2016	2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2017	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

4 sources

int_19h·Sep 11, 2021

Ada is a general-purpose programming language with an emphasis on safety and contract-oriented programming. There's a lot of software written in e.g. C++ today where Ada would be perfectly justified, if only it was more widespread and accessible. Here's one unusual example, a BSD package manager written in Ada: https://github.com/jrmarino/synth

In Clearing up Myths about Ada

floatboth·Nov 3, 2018

If you're building some ports with custom options, check out Synth: https://github.com/jrmarino/synth It downloads binary packages when it can & builds ports in parallel while showing a very nice ncurses UI :)

In OpenBSD on a Laptop

synthmeat·Nov 24, 2016

Give https://github.com/jrmarino/synth a whirl.

In FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro

synthmeat·May 31, 2016

Yes, on a small fleet of node.js (and some other services) VPS' on DigitalOcean in production, after a year or so playing with it for personal playthings. Default system uses less memory than Ubuntu (~50MB last time I checked which means something on .5, 1GB RAM instances). I could swear memory consumption in general has fallen down, but haven't done any measurements. I don't have to jump all over the web to figure out how something works - I just go to handbook. Which means one gets tendency to study topics instead of copy-paste snippets from around. Since base system (maybe things were different before) does not abruptly change or pull the rug under your feet, combined with handbook studies, this has the effect of compounding knowledge that'll be effective in years to come. Firewall (pf) is a thing of beauty. I've barely scratched the s

Read the rest

urface of it. Base/userland abstraction split, as well as consistency throughout the system helps one maintain a solid mental map of the system. After a short while, you just know where stuff is, how to configure it, and where its defaults are even when you're in completely new territories. Bonus: You can really go the distance without compiling anything, but if you're keen on maintaining a low memory profile by dropping various features from your packages, this is a great new build system I use to have all my pkgs up to date - https://github.com/jrmarino/synth

In Ask HN: Do you use FreeBSD as web server? Why or why not?