Ports gripe

[Kris Kennaway]

On Thu, May 06, 2004 at 01:54:27AM -0700, Clint Olsen wrote:
> On May 06, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> > 
> > Um, what "port interface"?
>  
> Portupgrade and friends.

Strictly speaking portupgrade is a third party utility.  It does a lot
of things (like upgrades) better than the bare ports collection, which
is why it's highly recommended.

If you prefer to use portupgrade over the make-based ports collection,
then by all means do so!

> > Using ports is documented in the Handbook (your canonical source of
> > FreeBSD documentation):
> > 
> >   http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports-using.html
> 
> Thanks for the links.  It doesn't really cover the fundamental issues -
> explaining the relationship between a port, a package, when to use make or
> when it's better to use port{install,upgrade} etc.  I have seen messages
> saying that portupgrade is preferred for a particular port over 'make
> install'.
> 
> Some of the confusion stems from the fact that there's portinstall but no
> portdeinstall.  There's pkg_deinstall, though, which appears to be a
> wrapper around pkg_delete.  Intuitively you'd expect the dual of each
> command - or at least some explanation of why one exists and the other does
> not.

Removing packages is simple, and there's no need for a whole new
utility to do what pkg_delete does.  It's upgrading that is hard, and
that is the main role of the portupgrade suite.

> In your original mail, you said I should have done "make all deinstall
> reinstall".  However, the first question that came out of my mind was, what
> exactly does the 'all' target do in this case, and are you referring to all
> the ports or just this one port in particular?

'all' is a synonym for 'build' in this case.  See also the ports(7)
manpage.

Kris
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