Will 5.4 be an "Extended Life" release?

[Brett Glass]

At 11:20 AM 4/18/2005, Steve Ames wrote:

>Ah. Packages and /stand/sysinstall. Yeah. I haven't installed a package from
>sysinstall in YEARS so I probably wouldn't have noticed that. Getting
>security updates for packages using sysinstall is a total lose. cvsup and
>portupgrade are my tools of choice...

I've never gotten portupgrade to work properly. CVS works, but is problematic
in that when you upgrade all of your ports and then decide to deinstall one,
the deinstall sometimes fails because of the upgrade! I like the ports
system, but it really is rough around the edges.

>with a little portaudit thrown in to
>let me know when I should update something. 

I've never tried using it.

>To use sysinstall you need
>something approaching an actual release (with ports). I use sysinstall to
>put a bare minium OS on a machine and then immediately switch to cvsup.

Yes, this works most of the time. But, as mentioned above, you can be
surprised when you update your ports and suddenly find that (a) you
can't even deinstall because of changes to a port, or (b) you go back
to a port to compile it with different options and find that there's
a whole new version there that won't compile for some reason. (This
happened to me just last week on an older system. After the cvsup,
the master Makefile for the ports collection was no longer compatible
with the version of "make" on the system, so I couldn't do ANYTHING
with ANY port.)

--Brett