Running STABLE ports on RELEASE

[Matthew Seaman]

On Mon, Nov 01, 2004 at 02:16:35PM +0000, Jonathon McKitrick wrote:
> 
> I have been having terrible problems lately with portupgrade dumping core
> and gnome2 not wanting to build or run on my box.  I'm thinking of wiping
> the drive and doing a clean installation of 4.10, installing packages for
> what I want, and then cvsupping the ports tree to get the latest versions of
> thunderbird and firefox.

If it's the problem with the btree files in BerkeleyDB 1.65 that's
causing Ruby to core dump on you while running portsdb then running
4.10-RELEASE won't help you.  That problem was a bug in the base
system, which has been fixed in RELENG_4, RELENG_5 (before RELENG_5_3
was branched) and HEAD.  The fix is here:

    http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/lib/libc/db/btree/bt_split.c.diff?r1=1.6&r2=1.7
 
> Would there be any problem doing that?  I'm thinking I could just use
> portupgrade on a fresh installation to avoid the coredumps and by limiting
> the STABLE ports installation to just the 2 I listed I can keep everything
> from breaking like it is now.

In general, no there's no problem with updating your ports using the
latest version of the tree so long as you're running a supported OS
version[1].  In fact, that is the way you're meant to use the ports:
always grab the most up to date version of the tree that you can.
Mixing recent ports and older packages (or any other combination of
old/new ports/packages) is not recommended -- although in the main it
will work just fine, as time goes by eventually things will start to
break in unexplained ways.

If you're having trouble with various ports, why not post the details
of what you're seeing? (if not here, then to freebsd-ports@ or
freebsd-gnome@).  After searching the archives, of course.  Chances
are you're not the only person to be bitten that way.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

[1] Well, ports only get tested on the latest releases from RELENG_4
and RELENG_5, so problems for, say, 4.8-RELEASE might pop up
occasionally, but they should be fixed in relatively short order.

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                       26 The Paddocks
                                                      Savill Way
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey         Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614                                  Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/attachments/20041101/6c717b56/attachment.bin