How often cvsup the ports?

Colin Percival cperciva at freebsd.org
Thu Oct 6 07:55:02 PDT 2005


Andrew P. wrote:
> On 10/6/05, Mikael Backman <mback99 at telia.com> wrote:
>>I use Portupgrade to install apps every now and then.
>>How often should I cvsup the ports?
> 
> If you like being up-to-date, you should consider
> using portsnap, which is much more efficient than
> cvsup. You can update every other couple of hours
> then - and you'll probably waste less bandwidth
> in a week than you would with cvsup in one run.

Portsnap certainly is more efficient than cvsup for
frequent updating, but for most people, updating the
ports tree every 2 hours is rather pointless.  On my
6.0-beta systems, I have a nightly cron job which runs

  portsnap -I cron update && pkg_version -vIL=

which downloads updates, builds new ports INDEX files,
and emails me a list of installed packages which are
out of date.

When I get such an email, I log into the system and run

  portsnap update && portupgrade -a

which updates the ports tree and rebuilds the installed
packages which are out of date.

Between FreeBSD Update, portsnap, and portupgrade, I
doubt I spend more than half an hour per month keeping
each system up to date.

Colin Percival


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