Portmanager vs portupgrade
Warren Block
wblock at wonkity.com
Thu Jan 23 15:46:33 UTC 2014
On Thu, 23 Jan 2014, 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?
Your subject line mentions portmanager, which is an old system that has
apparently been removed from ports.
I used portupgrade for something like a decade. It works, but now I
have switched to portmaster. It also works, but is just a shell script
and can be run without Ruby and bdb, which in turn depend on other
things.
Portupgrade is more mature and has a few features that come in handy at
rare times, like being able to upgrade a given port and everything it
depends on.
Portmaster is simpler, has less overhead, and has default behavior that
learned from some of portupgrade's mistakes, like fetching distfiles and
showing config screens all at the start of the process instead of mixed
in with the build. It also parallelizes some things rather than doing
them serially, like checking for distfiles, and can be faster because of
that.
There is no problem switching between them, the ports that are installed
are the same.
I would suggest using portmaster, and installing and using portupgrade
only if you need one of the features it provides that portmaster lacks.
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