A more tenuously package-related question

[Clifton Royston]

On Sun, Oct 14, 2007 at 04:05:20PM -0700, soralx at cydem.org wrote:
> 
> >   I used to use pkg_update from the 'pkg_install-devel' toolset to
> > upgrade systems via replacement of binary packages.  Its
> > implementation had some minor flaws - it was essentially a perl
> > wrapper for an iterative "pkg_delete -f" followed by "pkg_add -f",
> > which made it problematic to upgrade either the perl or pkg_install
> > packages, for instance - but the core idea was excellent.  Despite
> > those flaws it was very useful in maintaining servers via binary
> > packages, because it would reconnect the pkgdb dependencies on the
> > old package version to the new package version.  However, it's not
> > part of the current base package tools.
> > 
> >   Is there any better equivalent tool at the moment, or should I just
> > resuscitate the old "pkg_update"?
> 
> Did you try ports-mgmt/portupgrade? You can run it as `portupgrade -P`
> for binary updates. Besides actual 'portupgrade', it has a set of
> useful tools, too. But be warned -- the utility is snail-slow.

  I did look at it, but it appeared that it needed to run off the
FreeBSD ports tree, whereas I'm building packages from a separate
instance of the ports tree in our own CVS, with local modifications,
and then deploying these packages on multiple servers.  (This time
around, I'm planning to not even install the ports tree on servers
other than the build server.)  I therefore need to use a utility which
can operate using only the dependency information in the pkgdb and
embedded in the package files themselves.

  After posting before, I decided to explore pkg_replace, and it
appears that it might be able to do what I want with the right options.

  -- Clifton

-- 
    Clifton Royston  --  cliftonr at iandicomputing.com / cliftonr at lava.net
       President  - I and I Computing * http://www.iandicomputing.com/
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