Hi Pino!
> 1. could be 5.0 a good base to start to join a quite STABLE
> configuration?
STABLE (in the meaning of production stable) is currently at the 4.x
branch. This is still the recommended version for production (live) systems.
If you're wanting to give the new technology a try, you should use the
latest CURRENT (development) branch. The latest release of the CURRENT
branch is 5.2.1. From my point of view I would suggest to use that
version in favour of 5.0 or 5.1 releases.
You may get a stable working system even with the CURRENT releases but
that depends on (mostly) your hardware. Some components are only
available at the CURRENT branch so if you've some special needs, you
should use a 5.x-RELEASE version.
>
> 2. where I can get (order and buy) tarball ports on cd's and, in such
> case, what should be the right order to get the appropriate versions,
> according to the level of patching and evolution of the FreeBSD
> version (non matter which, 5.0 or different ...) I'll be using?
>
I don't think you will really need all of the 7000+ sources of the ports
system. The ports system comes with some thousand files (mostly
makesfiles) and these files are carrying the information where to get
the files for a port in question. So if you want to install a single
port, just cd to /usr/ports/???/??? and 'make install clean' while your
machine is online. That will fetch the sources of the port and any
dependencies, compile and install.
It really doesn't make sense to have all these 7000+ ports be installed
on a single machine.
My production machine (server, router, gateway - one does it all -
machine) currently has only 168 ports installed. Do not install any
ports you won't need!
Also the ports collection is not a bunch of source code. You may see it
as a maintaned database which holds information about where to get the
source archives for a single port. The ports collection itself doesn't
depend on -STABLE or -CURRENT. You may even rcp/rsync/scp your ports
collection from a 4.9-STABLE machine to a 5.2-CURRENT machine.
HTH,
Volker
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