Portupgrade - missing packages

[Jürgen Strass]

Hi there,

I'm new to FreeBSD and still trying out some things. After installing 
the 6.1-Release some days ago, I ran freebsd-update, portsnap and 
portupgrade to update the system / fix security issues. What I wanted to 
do was an entire upgrade based on binary packages.

portupgrade -aPPR

reported several errors about not being able to find the related 
packages though. I read the handbook again and realized that I might 
need to set PACKAGESITE. As described, running a release, I set it to

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-6-stable/All/

Still, portupgrade couldn't find the packages. So I set it to

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-current/All/

which worked with regard to downloading the packages, but resulted in 
several errors about packages being built for another version of FreeBSD 
(okay, it didn't take me long to realize that current packages probably 
won't work for a release).

Setting PACKAGESITE back to ftp://.../packages-6-stable/Latest/ and 
deinstalling all packages, I tried to install new packages directly with 
"pkg_add -r". Same problem as with portupgrade: pkg_add couldn't find 
some dependent packages.

When I looked at ftp.freebsd.org, I realized that some symbolic links in 
Latest/ pointed into nirvana. For example, the .tbz file python was 
linked to didn't exist in All/. I tried ftp.de.freebsd.org and since the 
links were correct, I was able to install the 'latest' packages with 
pkg_add -r without errors. I also found out that the Russian ftp server 
has some packages the German server doesn't have and vice versa (same 
directories!).

I ran 'pkg_version -v | grep -e "updating"' and it showed to me that my 
ports collection nevertheless was newer than the packages I just had 
downloaded.

Please, where do I get the newest packages for the 6.1-Release? How do I 
need to set my PACKAGESITE variable? Is it intended that the FTP servers 
are out of sync? Is there any misunderstanding about doing binary 
updates on my part?

Many greetings,
Jürgen

PS: Very similar questions were already asked on this mailing lists, but 
not answered satisfyingly. At least it seems I'm not the only newbie 
having problems with portupgrade. It would be nice if the handbook could 
say a bit more about setting PACKAGESITE correctly.