Returning with question about SELECTIVELY updating ports tree

[Mark Terribile]

Hi,

A while ago I came here with a question and got what seemed like good answers.  After a number of distractions, I came back to the matter and discovered that the answers don't seem so good.  So let me pose the case again, and if I have misunderstood you, or misunderstood the documentation or the various program messages, I beg your pardon.

Here's the problem: I'm running an older FreeBSD (7.2) and I have some things which make wholesale upgrade prohibitive at the moment.  (The moment is running rather long, but so are the benchmarks I'm running on the system.)  I need to get up-to-date versions of some ports, but I cannot afford a wholesale upgrade, nor afford to wipe out everything in my ports tree, nor to bolix the relationship between the control database and the contents of the tree.

I had asked for advice, and gotten "csup or portsnap".  Investigation reveals that csup involves fooling around with the cvs system, and the implications of that are VERY unclear to me.  I've done a portsnap fetch, and would like to update the control database (index files?) so that the local system knows which more up-to-date ports are available, but I don't want to wipe out everything, nor do I want to do a blind wholesale update.  The last time I tried that I found ports that simply wouldn't build unless I switched to the lastest FreeBSD, which was (for several reasons) out of the question on that machine.

So: How do I upgrade my ports system selectively, without wiping out everything?

Right now, the pressing need is to see whether there are new versions of the CD-burning programs.  I have a couple of new drives and the CDs burnt on them fail on other readers, but only after a couple of passes.  I'd like to put new versions up to see if they know more about these drives, again without wiping out my whole ports tree.  There is much else I would like to work on upgrading, but that's the immediate problem.  (And yes, they are new, and one was purchased specifically because the other had this problem.)

If there is a way to do this with portsnap, please tell me how.  I've tried the -I option but it seems to want me to do the extract which (according to the man page) will wipe out the whole tree.

    Mark Terribile