How did upgrading applications happen before portupgrade etc?

[Rakhesh Sasidharan]

Kris Kennaway wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 11, 2007 at 11:37:22AM +0200, Tobias Roth wrote:
>> Kris Kennaway wrote:
>>> On Sat, Aug 11, 2007 at 12:03:33PM +0400, Rakhesh Sasidharan wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> Just a question that struck me today. Before there were the portupgrade
>>>> and other tools for upgrading installed applications to their newer
>>>> versions, how did things work out?
>>>>
>>>> Did one upgrade applications through a series of "make deinstall
>>>> reinstall" commands (I wonder if these commands take care of dependencies
>>>> too) or was there any other way?
>>>
>>> Basically that, plus a lot of other manual steps that were always
>>> somewhat hard to get exactly right but which more or less worked back
>>> in the days when Gnomes lived in your garden and Java was a place on
>>> the map.  It was a simpler, more innocent age.
>>
>> There was pkg_version -c that printed a sequence of
>>
>> cd /usr/ports/foo/bar
>> make
>> make deinstall
>> make install
>> make clean
>>
>> or something like that. Whatever broke was fixed manually afterwards :-)
>> Oh, and there was no UPDATING in /usr/ports/ as well I think.
>
> Old-timers will tell you that pkg_version is a new-fangled invention,
> and back in the day they had to slave for hours over a hot keyboard to
> run all those make commands by hand :)

I see. That bad eh ... no pkg_version even! I guess then the only way was 
to track cvs updates to see if anything of interest has been updated 
recently and then upgrade it manually. :-/

I'm curious now -- how does portupgrade (that's the tool I know/ use so 
I'll use that as an example) do its upgrading? I have seen that in case of 
an upgrade in builds the newer version, uninstalls the previous one (even 
though it might be required by other apps), and then installs the newer 
version. How does it do that -- by some magic of its own or does it use 
the usual ports commands etc?

Any place where I can get more info on these 3rd party tools? Not too 
techie, but a bird's eye view of things ...

TIA,
Rakhesh