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<P>The FreeBSD Ports and Packages Collection offers a simple way for
users and administrators to install applications.  There are currently
<!--<A HREF="growth/status.png">--><B>&ports.count;</B><!--</A>--> ports available.
</P>

<P>The Ports Collection supports the latest release on the
<A HREF="&base;/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/introduction.html#CURRENT">
FreeBSD-CURRENT</A> and
<A HREF="&base;/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/introduction.html#STABLE">
FreeBSD-STABLE</A> branches.  Older releases are not
supported and may or may not work correctly with an up-to-date ports
collection.  Over time, changes to the ports collection may rely on
features that are not present in older releases.  Wherever convenient,
we try not to gratuitously break support for recent releases, but it
is sometimes unavoidable.  When this occurs, patches contributed by
the user community to maintain support for older releases will usually
be committed.
</P>

<P>Each ``port'' listed here
contains any patches necessary to make the original application source
code compile and run on FreeBSD.  Installing an application is as
simple as typing
<A HREF="http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=make"><TT>make</TT></A>
in the port directory.  If you
download the framework for the entire list of ports by installing the
<!--<A HREF="ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/ports/ports.tar.gz">-->
<A HREF="http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports-using.html#PORTS-TREE">
ports hierarchy</A>, you can have
thousands of applications right at your fingertips.
</P>

<P>
Each port's <TT>Makefile</TT> automatically fetches the
application source code, either from a local disk, CD-ROM or via
<A HREF="http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ftp"><TT>ftp</TT></A>,
unpacks it on your system, applies the patches, and compiles.  If
all went well, a simple <TT>make install</TT> will install the
application and register it with the package system.</P>

<P>For most ports, a precompiled <TT>package</TT> also exists, saving
the user the work of having to compile anything at all.  Each port
contains a link to its corresponding package and you may either simply
download that file and then run the
<A HREF="http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=pkg_add"><TT>pkg_add</TT></A>
command
on it or you can simply grab the link location and hand it straight
to <TT>pkg_add</TT> since it is capable of accepting FTP URLs as
well as filenames.</P>

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