keeping all things up to date

[Michael Grant]

> Just as an example that just came up recently: gettext was updated in
> the ports tree, which required a rebuild of all ports that depend on
> it. I missed reading /usr/ports/UPDATING before, so I didn't notice
> this fact. I did an update on my girlfriends laptop which resulted in
> several applications not being usable anymore. Imagine my face as I
> had to explain to her why she was unable to use her machine for one
> and a half day.
> Another lesson learned...
>
> That's why I agree to Chad: Doing automatic updates isn't advisable.
> They might even come at the wrong time, e.g. when you need your system
> resources. I'm thinking about monsters like OpenOffice, GNOME or KDE.

Wait, before this gets out of hand, yes, I've been bitten with gettext
more than once over the years.  Mostly I'm worried about bug fixes in
the OS and in the ports I've installed.  I'm not talking about massive
upgrade from one version of the OS to another.

What would be nice to see is some script that would sort out
dependencies and update things sanely.

I think we're all guilty at some point of not having read UPDATING and
updating something.    It would be nice if there was something could
watch out for certain conditions and then print out the relevant
section from UPDATING on the screen.

Those are just some obvious ideas.  However, there are unix systems,
for example Ubuntu, which has a sort of package manager that handles
automated updates that sorts out dependencies.  I was just wondering
if anyone had done anything like that for FreeBSD?

Michael Grant