pkg_upgrade?
Joe
dev at freedomcircle.net
Mon May 29 16:42:03 PDT 2006
Hi,
I've read the documentation and it seems there's no pkg_upgrade or
pkg_update, or a way to install an updated/upgraded package. I'd like
to determine if that is indeed the case.
I installed 6.0-RELEASE from a CD and then installed such packages as
X.org and Firefox (using pkg_add -r). That gave me, for example, the
latest Firefox that was available for 6.0-RELEASE, i.e., 1.0.7, but I
wanted to install 1.5. However, when I downloaded the 1.5 .tbz from
ftp.freebsd.org and tried to use pkg_add on it, it complained that
Firefox was already installed.
I then decided to upgrade the OS to 6.1-RELEASE via ftp by using
sysinstall. AFAICT, the upgrade of the base system went OK (except for
the fact that /etc/motd and uname still refer to 6.0-RELEASE). However,
the installation of X.org packages did not go well, starting with errors
in trying to install the expat package.
The documentation mentions portupgrade and portmanager as mechanisms to
upgrade ports, but if I'm not mistaken these invoke source updates, not
a binary upgrade as was done for the OS. It appears that the only way
to upgrade in binary form is to use pkg_delete -f to remove each
package, e.g., expat 1.98, and then pkg_add to get the newer (2.0)
version. And then you have to be extra careful with dependencies
between packages.
I don't have any major problems with upgrading from sources (assuming
they build cleanly as expected), but I wanted to explore the binary
upgrading route first to determine how easy it would be for someone
without much technical abilities to install FreeBSD and some user
packages and maintain it without getting involved in recompiling sources.
Thanks for your assistance.
Joe
More information about the freebsd-questions
mailing list