portupgrade vs. portmanager

[Peter Schuller]

> Right now portmanager is upgrading kdelibs and I'm still using it. The 
> only problem that might occur is between the deinstall/reinstall steps
> I'll be missing the libraries for about a minute, when this happens I 
> just wait untill its finished reinstalling then continue.  
> Here is a recap of what happens:
...
> I've been testing this for a year now and haven't had a problem yet
> using a program while it is being updated.

That does indeed sound perfectly painless. I failed to remember that there
is another factor playing into my annoyance with pkg_chk - namely that
it seems to remove dependent packages in chunks prior to re-installing
them. So the end-result is that the system is completely missing several
packages for extended periods of time while a bunch of other packages are
being compiled.

I don't know why this is done or exactly under what circumstances. But
indeed, the way portmanager behaves as you described above sounds
a lot better.

> Portupgrade has one serious flaw in my opinion and that is running 
> something like pkgdb -F damages the port installation database as far 
> as I'm concerned.  It causes the data base to say ports were built with 
> dependency ports that they were  never really built with.  Portmanager 
> only addresses that one issue and for the forseeable future that is 
> where all the focus will be, only on correctly updating ports.

Ok. That sounds good. To be honest I have never understood why the dependencies
seem to randombly break, requiring a lot of fiddling with pkgdb.

I tried portmanager in the past but missed the fact of 'proper' upgrading of
entire dependency chains. I will have another go now though. Thanks for
the clarifications!

-- 
/ Peter Schuller, InfiDyne Technologies HB

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