Upgrading sets of packages?

[Ivan Voras]

Hello,

An example of a very common operation I have to do is to upgrade PHP.
Here's what I have one one of my machines:

# pkg info -q | grep php
php5-5.3.8
php5-bcmath-5.3.8
php5-bz2-5.3.8
php5-ctype-5.3.8
php5-curl-5.3.8
php5-dom-5.3.8
php5-exif-5.3.8
php5-extensions-1.6
php5-fileinfo-5.3.8
php5-filter-5.3.8
php5-ftp-5.3.8
php5-gd-5.3.8
php5-hash-5.3.8
php5-iconv-5.3.8
php5-json-5.3.8
php5-ldap-5.3.8
php5-mbstring-5.3.8
php5-mcrypt-5.3.8
php5-mysql-5.3.8
php5-mysqli-5.3.8
php5-openssl-5.3.8
php5-pcntl-5.3.8
php5-pdo-5.3.8
php5-pdo_sqlite-5.3.8
php5-pgsql-5.3.8
php5-phar-5.3.8
php5-posix-5.3.8
php5-session-5.3.8
php5-snmp-5.3.8
php5-soap-5.3.8
php5-sockets-5.3.8
php5-sqlite-5.3.8
php5-sqlite3-5.3.8
php5-tokenizer-5.3.8
php5-xml-5.3.8
php5-xmlreader-5.3.8
php5-xmlrpc-5.3.8
php5-xmlwriter-5.3.8
php5-zip-5.3.8
php5-zlib-5.3.8

All of the module packages depend on the php package.

Simply running "pkg install php5" only wants to upgrade the php5
package, which will obviously break everything:

----
Updating repository catalogue
The following 2 packages will be installed:

    Upgrading libxml2: 2.7.8_1 -> 2.8.0_3
    Upgrading php5: 5.3.8 -> 5.4.24

The installation will require 2 MB more space
----

Trying to upgrade the php5-extensions package which depends on all the
rest also doesn't work as it wants to upgrade only a subset of the
packages:

----
Updating repository catalogue
The following 21 packages will be installed:

    Upgrading libxml2: 2.7.8_1 -> 2.8.0_3
    Upgrading sqlite3: 3.8.0.2 -> 3.8.2
    Upgrading php5: 5.3.8 -> 5.4.24
    Upgrading php5-xmlwriter: 5.3.8 -> 5.4.24
    Upgrading php5-dom: 5.3.8 -> 5.4.24
    Upgrading php5-xml: 5.3.8 -> 5.4.24
    Upgrading php5-simplexml: 5.3.8 -> 5.4.24
    Upgrading php5-ctype: 5.3.8 -> 5.4.24
    Upgrading php5-posix: 5.3.8 -> 5.4.24
    Upgrading php5-hash: 5.3.8 -> 5.4.24
    Upgrading php5-filter: 5.3.8 -> 5.4.24
    Upgrading php5-tokenizer: 5.3.8 -> 5.4.24
    Upgrading php5-json: 5.3.8 -> 5.4.24
    Upgrading php5-sqlite3: 5.3.8 -> 5.4.24
    Upgrading php5-pdo: 5.3.8 -> 5.4.24
    Upgrading php5-iconv: 5.3.8 -> 5.4.24
    Upgrading php5-phar: 5.3.8 -> 5.4.24
    Upgrading php5-session: 5.3.8 -> 5.4.24
    Upgrading php5-xmlreader: 5.3.8 -> 5.4.24
    Upgrading php5-pdo_sqlite: 5.3.8 -> 5.4.24
    Upgrading php5-extensions: 1.6 -> 1.7

The installation will require 3 MB more space
----

For example, the php5-gd package isn't included in the above list even
though it is depended on by php5-extenions:

# pkg info -d php5-extensions | grep gd
    php5-gd-5.3.8

and it depends on php5:

# pkg info -r php5 | grep gd
    php5-gd-5.3.8

My question is: what is the correct way to upgrade (in this case) all
of the php5-* packages? Running "pkg install `pkg info -q | grep php`"
doesn't work because it tries to install packages by including the
full version number, and those old packages are neither what I want
nor available, and I can't find an argument to "pkg info" which only
shows the base package names without the extensions.

Further, it looks like "pkg upgrade" doesn't accept package names,
which seems odd.