Status of portupgrade and portmaster?

[Matt Smith]

On Oct 02 09:07, Carmel NY wrote:
>On Sun, 1 Oct 2017 23:49:14 +0100, Matthew Seaman stated:
>
>>On 01/10/2017 11:34, Carmel NY wrote:
>>> 1. Does it determine out-of-date update packages automatically or does
>>> the user have to determine that what is out-of-date and feed them to
>>> poudriere manually and in the proper order?
>>
>>Automatic.
>>
>>> 2. From what I have read, the user is required to install each package
>>> manually. Is that correct?
>>
>>Poudriere builds a repository.  You then have to type 'pkg upgrade' or
>>'pkg install foo' to update your live system.  Most people do not find
>>this particularly taxing.
>
>From the "pkg-descr" file:
>
>poudriere is a tool primarily designed to test package production on
>FreeBSD. However, most people will find it useful to bulk build ports
>for FreeBSD.
>
>While it will undoubtedly work, it is still more complex than the average
>desktop user requirers. Synth fits the bill nicely by being, for the most
>part, easy to understand and run. I am already on my forth "ports maintenance"
>program having used portmanager, portmaster, portupgrade and now synth. At
>this point, I would almost rather switch to a new OS before abandoning synth
>for something that IMHO is just overkill for the average user.
>
>Just my 2¢.
>

Of course if you did move to a different OS then the chances are you 
would be using a binary package repository and not compiling any 
software from source. So you wouldn't have any choice over the options 
that these packages were built with.

If you are happy enough to do this then you may as well just abandon 
building ports on FreeBSD anyway and just use the pkg tool from the 
official FreeBSD repository. This is the easiest option surely.

For what it's worth I've used both synth and poudriere and whilst 
poudriere is slightly heavier to use because of the requirement to 
create a build jail first, once that step has been done it's pretty much 
identical to using synth really.

My workflow is simply this:

poudriere ports -u (update the ports tree)
poudriere bulk -j 11 -f pkglist (check for any updates and build any 
packages listed in the pkglist file)
pkg upgrade (upgrade any upgraded packages)

That's it. The same workflow on synth is:
svn up /usr/ports
synth build pkglist
pkg upgrade

Pretty similar if you ask me. OK you could use synth upgrade-system and 
do it in one command rather than two but then you're building everything 
on the host system and not a specific list. Also I like the extra pkg 
stage, it gives me a chance to see what pkg is about to do and abort it 
if it wants to do something insane.

-- 
Matt