Upgrading seems like a hassle...

[Adam Weinberger]

Kiffin Gish wrote:
> Just a comment to throw around and trigger discussion. Seems to me that the only way to upgrade gnome on freebsd is via an unorthodox script which takes just short of forever to run. My poor laptop churns for a couple days before I can use it again.

If you don't like the script, write a better one. The script removes 
ports, and then reinstalls them in the correct order, with library 
dependencies resolved. There's nothing unorthodox about that.

> For me this is such a hassle that it is a good reason not to go with gnome at all on freebsd in the first place -- especially when others like windowmaker, enlightenment, xfce4, etc. only need a simple portupgrade to get things going.

WindowMaker, Enlightenment, and XFCE4 are not nearly as large as GNOME. 
Furthermore, they're not even the same THING as GNOME.  And what's more, 
XFCE and Enlightenment depend on GNOME libraries anyway, so they'd be 
subject to the exact same upgrade needs as the rest of GNOME.

> What do others think about this? Isn't there another less painful way possible? Am I doing something wrong?

Yes, you are. You're wasting your time complaining. Do you think that we 
are sitting here laughing to ourselves about how we've duped 
unsuspecting GNOME users into running a script instead of just using a 
simple portupgrade? Do you think that we've spent countless hours 
building a port infrastructure and uprade procedures because it was 
somehow the easy way out? Don't you think that if we knew about an 
easier way to reliably upgrade a system that works for everybody, we'd 
be advising that people do that instead?

I didn't like having to run the upgrade script either. I didn't like 
having to keep my box down for a few days. We get no sadistic pleasure 
out of making people jump through hoops to upgrade their systems. But 
we've worked very, very hard to make the script take care of as many 
things as possible, and require little more from a user other than 
requiring them to find something non-computer-related to entertain 
themselves with for a while.

I'll make you the same offer I've made to everybody else who's whined 
about the upgrade procedure without offering a viable alternate solution 
that will work for everybody: make a better upgrade procedure, and we'll 
use it instead.

# Adam


-- 
Adam Weinberger
adamw at magnesium.net || adamw at FreeBSD.org
adamw at vectors.cx    ||   adamw at gnome.org
http://www.vectors.cx