Binary packages for releases and portupgrade

[Freddie Cash]

On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 2:37 PM, Freddie Cash <fjwcash at gmail.com> wrote:

> Have a read through the ports man page and the pkg_add man page.  Pay
> attention to the PACKAGESITE environment variable.
>
> This variable tells pkg_add (and portupgrade, and portmaster) where to
> search for binary packages.
>
> By default, this is set to
>   ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-X-release/Latest/
>
> where X is the version of FreeBSD installed (7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 8.0, etc).
>
> All you have to do is change it to use "packages-8-stable" instead of
> "packages-8.0-release", and it will search for, and install, binary packages
> that were built on 8-STABLE.
>
> Note:  one should be using a release version that is as close to -STABLE as
> possible.  IOW, the latest release on that branch (6.4 if you want 6-stable
> packages, 7.2 if you want 7-stable packages, 8.0 if you want 8-stable
> packages).  That minimises the number and size of changes between -release
> and -stable, and will keep things running smoothly.
>
> Note 2:  be sure to set the correct architecture as well.  Change the
"i386" to "amd64" if you have the 64-bit amd64/x86_64 version of FreeBSD
installed.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwcash at gmail.com