Portmanager vs portupgrade

[Matthew Seaman]

On 01/23/14 11:35, Jos Chrispijn wrote:
>    I lately read more often that Portmaster is preferred about portupdate.
>    Can you tell me why this is? I know that portupdate is Ruby driven, but
>    furthermore I cannot detect the real advantages one above the other?

It used to be that portmaster was preferred because it had an active
maintainer and also fewer dependencies, as it is written in pure shell.

However, the original maintainer of portmaster (dougb) has moved away
from FreeBSD-ish things, and both portmaster and portupgrade are now
maintained by the same people (bdrewery mostly).  portupgrade requires
you to install ruby as well: that's probably the biggest deciding factor
still extant.  Mostly it's just a matter of personal preference.

Of course, nowadays there are alternatives 3 and 4:

  (3) Use pkg(8) and the precompiled packages from pkg.freebsd.org

  (4) Use pkg(8) and set up your own package repo using poudriere
      or similar.

Option (4) is (IMHO) the most effective way to manage an environment
with several FreeBSD servers[*] needing any software with non-standard
options settings today.  (3) is quite usable for many purposes right
now, but there are enhancements in the pipeline which will make it even
better over the next few years.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

[*] ie. two or more, including counting jails and virtualized machines.


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