portmanager install from packages (please)

[RW]

On Friday 05 May 2006 15:17, Joel Hatton wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've lately been using portmanager on my build host, instead of
> portupgrade, to rebuild ports and produce packages and I'm impressed. But
> now I want more...
>
> It seems to me that one of the greatest benefits of portmanager is that
> it is a compiled executable, and thus doesn't rely on Ruby.  In our
> environment, where ports are built on one machine and then installed from
> packages on others, it would make a lot of sense if I didn't have to
> install Ruby just so that I can run portupgrade.  All I really want to do
> is put the new packages on the machine and upgrade from those, using a
> single binary that doesn't require extra support. But, brilliant though
> it is, I can't do this with portmanager.
>
> Now, it occurs to me that I could just do something as simple as run
> pkg_delete/pkg_add against the most recently available packages, but I'm
> sure I'd risk breaking something on a critical host. Extending portmanager
> to perform this function seems logical.


I'm not sure portmanager is still under active development. I understand the 
developer had an argument with the FreeBSD people and stormed-off,  taking 
his bat and ball with him. For a short period it was withdrawn from the ports 
tree, and I dont think it's been updated since. It's a shame because it had 
just been through a major reworking and, in my experience, it still has some 
problems.  

Portmanager was not really intended to be much more than a replacement 
for "portupgrade -a". I don't really see there is much connection with what 
you want, aside from the absence of a binary replacement for 
portupgrade -PPa. Portupgrade itself is is actually pretty crude in this 
area, so there is probably scope for a smarter replacement anyway. 

The cleanest way to upgrade would be to take the machine offline, delete every 
package and then pkg_add the new ones (it would also be a good idea to make 
sure the package database on the build machine is fully self-consistent 
before building packages)