Upgrade Tool

[Kris Kennaway]

On Sat, Apr 29, 2006 at 03:01:21PM -0700, Chris Maness wrote:
> Kris Kennaway wrote:
> >On Sat, Apr 29, 2006 at 08:58:58AM -0700, Chris Maness wrote:
> >  
> >>Currently, I download the tarballs for each specific application by 
> >>hand, delete the old folder, then untar the new directory in the ports 
> >>tree.  Is there an app that does this without having to do this by 
> >>hand.  I know about cvs syncing the whole ports tree, but I prefer to 
> >>upgrade the specific applications that have issues not the whole tree.
> >>    
> >
> >This is much harder than you might think; often applications depend on
> >other applications and infrastructure elements in complex and
> >unintuitive ways, so you will easily get your system into an
> >inconsistent, unbuildable state following this method.
> >
> >The only foolproof way to do it is to update the entire tree; tools
> >like portsnap and cvsup make this *really easy*, so why add extra
> >effort and risks?
> >
> >Kris
> >  
> I do this because it is not necessary to build every third party 
> application just because I have a problem with one.  I have ran into 
> this UNIX version of DLL hell, but it was easy to fix after I synced the 
> whole tree and ran portupgrade -a.  That just rebuilt everything 
> installed, and made everything current.  I have been upgrading single 
> apps by hand with no ill results for a while.  The only time igot into 
> trouble was after I synced the whole tree and tried only upgrading some 
> of the apps.  It just seems like re-compiling every application every 
> time portaudit finds a security hole is a waste of processor time.

Except that portupgrade -a doesn't do this.

Anyway, no-one is forcing you to run portupgrade -a if you don't want
to.

IMO, it's still not worth the hassle of manually updating your ports
tree in little bits and pieces, even if there was a foolproof way to
do that.

Kris

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