Question about packages

Milscvaer millueradfa at yahoo.com
Thu Sep 29 13:38:42 PDT 2005


Hello,

I have question about packages. I would like to
upgrade some packages on my FreeBSD 5.4 system to the
latest versions avialable in ports, but I would like
to upgrade using binary packages and not compile them
from ports (using portupgrade -PP -R package). How
often are the binary packages in 5-stable for instance
rebuilt to the latest version? It is pretty critical
to keep these updated constantly, preferably every
day, to get the latest security fixes in a new version
of a package. I noticed that Firefox still seems to be
at 1.0.6 even though 1.0.7 has been out for several
days. Does FreeBSD have a system set up where when a
port is upgraded to a new version, the binary package
for the port is automatically rebuilt soon after, such
as at least within the next day so that the latest
version in ports is also avialable as a binary
package. This is very essential. I hope such a feature
can be provided.

Does also, is anything done to avoid the situation
where an older program needs an older version of a
dependancies and a newer program needs a newer version
of the same depedancy? The way, currently, that I
believe we avoid the
DLL-hell situation on FreeBSD, where a new program
would install a new version of a library, blowing up
older programs on the system that used an older
version of the same library, being
incompatable with the new version, is to append a
version number to every .so file in the lib
directories, and have all programs to a specific
version of a library, such as one program may use
mylib.so.1.0 while a new program might use
mylib.so.2.0. Thus if a new program needs a new
version of a library, it can be installed and use the
new version, but all older programs can continue to
use the old version. 

Does portupgrade leave older versions of a library
dependancy in place when installing a new version of
such a dependancy, so that applications that require
the newer version of the dependancy can use the new
version, while applications that need the older
version can use the older version?

thank you very much,
Alistar

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