portupgrade postgresql-7.3.4_1

[Adam McLaurin]

On Sun, 16 May 2004 15:14:01 -0400
Michael Edenfield <kutulu at kutulu.org> wrote:

> * Lee Harr <missive at hotmail.com> [040516 15:00]:
> > >Trying to do the portupgrade of postgresql on my FreeBSD 5.2.1 box.
> > >When
> > >I try a 'pkg_delete postgresql-7.3.4_1', it has dependents and says
> > >cannot be deinstalled. How do I handle this port upgrade?
> > >
> > >esmtp# pkg_delete postgresql-7.3.4_1
> > >pkg_delete: package 'postgresql-7.3.4_1' is required by these other
> > >packages
> > >and may not be deinstalled:
> > >nagios-1.1_3
> > >nagios-plugins-1.3.1
> > >phppgadmin-3.0.1
> > >postfix-2.0.16,1
> > >
> > 
> > 
> > Have you ever used portupgrade?
> > http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports.html
> > http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports-using.html
> > (section 4.5.5 discusses portupgrade)
> 
> While portupgrade is easily the most effective solution, and the one I
> would also recommend, there are alternatives.  A 'make deinstall
> reinstall' in the port directory will do basically the same thing,
> though without the safety precations portupgrade takes.

I don't know why you'd even mention this 'alternative'. Doing this is
quite dangerous and requires so much more work.

a) If the new port is in any way broken (be it buggy source code, faulty
patches, bad Makefile, whatever), you'll be left trying to downgrade
your skeleton files to the previous version just to be able to use the
software at all (since you already removed it before you checked to see
if it even worked).

b) If the new port requires updated versions of the dependencies, doing
a 'make deinstall reinstall' will either not work at all or cause
problems.

Just want to make sure that the rookie understands the implications of
your "alternative" .. And why it really is NOT an alternative at all,
unless you REALLY know what you're doing (and have a lot of free time
and a solid test environment)

-- 
Adam

"satyam, shivam, sundaram"