libtool note in UPDATING

[Christopher Kelley]

Ade Lovett wrote:
>
> On Feb 27, 2006, at 14:06 , Christopher Kelley wrote:
>> Is there a more straightforward explanation of how to upgrade ports 
>> with the new libtool?
>
> That *is* the straightforward way of explaining it :)
>
> libtool is one of a handful of ports that is used so extensively by 
> the rest of the tree that providing a one-click method that's going to 
> work in every situation is an exercise in futility.  Around 1400 ports 
> were directly affected by the change, with several hundred more having 
> varying degrees of collateral damage (which, as far as I know, has all 
> been fixed as of the time of writing).  That's greater than 10% of the 
> tree as a whole.
>
> Judicious use of portupgrade and its ilk may certainly work in your 
> case, but there are absolutely no guarantees that something, 
> somewhere, in the rebuild will go wrong, and result in a rather messed 
> up set of packages on the system.
>
> If you want to be absolutely, positively sure, I'm afraid there is 
> only one simple solution, involving the archival of any configuration 
> files that may have been changed locally, followed by saving off a 
> list of the ports/packages installed on the system, then "rm -rf 
> /var/db/pkg/* /usr/local /usr/X11R6 /usr/compat/*" and building 
> everything from scratch.  I tested both this method, and the 
> portupgrade method, on two identically configured scratch boxes with a 
> few hundred ports installed on both, and the sledgehammer approach was 
> in fact considerably faster.
>
>> Also, will 6.1-RELEASE have this change already in the ports tree 
>> that it ships with?
>
> Yes.  This also offers a third solution.  Wait until 6.1-RELEASE comes 
> out, along with its associated package sets, and do a clean install 
> from there.  Ditto for 5.5-RELEASE if there is some reason to keep a 
> machine on the 5.x branch as opposed to jumping to 6.x
>
> -aDe
>
>
Which is, in fact, the solution I think I'm going to take.  I had 
planned on upgrading my last machine from 5.4 to 6.1 anyway, so that one 
wasn't a concern, but I had hoped to avoid the reinstall for my other 
(unfortunately very much slower) machines.

Thanks to everyone for all the suggestions and input.  I'm sorry that I 
don't have time to try some of the suggestions that have been made, this 
seems to be the fastest and simplest method.

Christopher