Editing Portal:FreeBSD,OpenBSD,etc (section)

=== pkgsrc as a Perl preservation layer ===

pkgsrc is historically important for Perl because it makes Perl portable beyond one operating system. Although pkgsrc began in the NetBSD world, it runs on many platforms. That means Perl modules packaged in pkgsrc can benefit users on NetBSD, SmartOS, illumos, macOS, Linux, and other systems supported by pkgsrc.

This is a different philosophy from OpenBSD. OpenBSD keeps Perl in base because it is part of the operating system’s own infrastructure. NetBSD/pkgsrc makes Perl portable by treating it as a package and by maintaining thousands of Perl modules through a cross-platform package framework.

For Perl users, pkgsrc is valuable because it provides a system package manager’s view of Perl modules. Instead of installing everything directly from CPAN, administrators can install `p5-*` packages that are tracked, upgraded, and removed through pkgsrc tools.