Am Donnerstag, 21. Februar 2008 15:58:51 schrieb James Harrison:

Err, don't confuse ebuilds with packages. A package is a piece of software (which is the equivalent of a port), whereas an ebuild is an install script for a specific version of a package. Normally, there's more than one version of a package (more than one ebuild) available for a package, which makes the ebuild count higher than the FreeBSD ports count, but the package count lower (somewhere above 12000).

This doesn't count slotted ebuilds: for example, Gentoo has just one gtk package, which contains several ebuilds for slot 12 which is gtk-1.2.x and several ebuilds for slot 20, which is gtk-2.x (different slots are treated as different packages by the system internally), whereas FreeBSD has a gtk12 and a gtk20 port, which installs the respective versions.

So, basically whatever numbers you take, they can't be compared directly anyway, but I guess that the number of ports is still higher than the Gentoo amortized package count would be.