cvsup newbie questions

[Joshua Tinnin]

On Saturday 18 December 2004 01:20 am, Toomas Aas 
<toomas.aas at raad.tartu.ee> wrote:
> Kevin Smith wrote:
> > 1) is there a test utility that I can run that will tell me which
> > cvsup mirror server will be fastest ?  I did this the manual way by
> > pinging a few and looking at the ave times coming back.
>
> There's a port out there called fastest_cvsup which is supposed to do
> exactly that. Personally I've never used it so I can't give any
> further comments.

/usr/ports/sysutils/fastest_cvsup/ - It works well; it's very simple. 
One way to use it is like this in a script (if you live in the US - if 
not, change the country code flag for fastest_cvsup): 

#!/bin/sh
# find fastest server
SERVER=`/usr/local/bin/fastest_cvsup -q -c us`

if [ "${SERVER}" != "" ]; then
        # update ports tree
        /usr/local/bin/cvsup -h $SERVER /path/to/ports-supfile
fi


> > 2) If I do update (src-all) using 5.3-RELENG tag is my version
> > still called 5.3-RELEASE ? - or is it now some new release of that
> > (ie like 5.3.1 ?)...I guess my question is:  Are all updates of
> > 5.3-RELEASE source still called 5.3-RELEASE.
>
> If you use RELENG_5_3 tag, you'll get 5.3-RELEASE-pN where N is a
> number which increases with every security update. Right now you
> would get 5.3-RELEASE-p2.
>
> If you use RELENG_5, you'll get 5.N-STABLE, where N is a number which
> increases after every release from the RELENG_5 branch. Right now you
> would get 5.3-STABLE.
>
> > 3) After my cvsup of the ports collection completes updating, is
> > there any easy way to check which ports were updated ?
>
> Using portupgrade you can check which of the ports you have installed
> were updated. But again, since I personally don't use portupgrade, I
> can't give you any furhter details on that. There should be more than
> you want to know about it in the list archives.

/usr/ports/sysutils/portupgrade/ Portupgrade also works well, especially 
in updating recursive dependencies. Most of the time, a port can easily 
be updated without incident along with its dependencies by checking for 
out-of-date ports:

# portversion -v | grep needs

And then upgrading:

# portupgrade -rR name-of-port

I use it all the time, as do quite a lot of other people. Here's an 
excellent tutorial by Dru Lavigne: 
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/08/28/FreeBSD_Basics.html?page=1

Check out the rest of her FreeBSD articles here: 
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/ct/15

- jt