running portupgrade -a

[Per olof Ljungmark]

Michael P. Soulier wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> It seems like a lot of people keep their ports regularly up to date by just
> running portupgrade -a. I've seen it online, and in books. 
> 
> As /usr/ports/UPDATING is rather large, it seems impossible to look for
> potential issues with every package that you're going to upgrade. So, is
> running portupgrade -a a good idea, as you likely haven't checked for issues
> for your system?
> 
> Otherwise, the ports change so fast that if you don't regularly update, when
> you do go to upgrade you may find yourself in a difficult position to do so. 

Mike,

Read the list, read /usr/ports/UPDATING and you're usually quite safe at 
least with -RELEASE or -STABLE. The FreeBSD ports system is an excellent 
tool and I have yet to see a better one.

You could do the upgrade procedure in many ways, this is what I do,

portupgrade -avn - this will show you what could be upgraded.
A brief search in UPDATING for issues
A brief look in the @ports and @questions perhaps
Usually no major hazzles so I just do a portupgrade -av and let it run, 
if there are any problems on the way I'll go back and fix them 
afterwards. This would be the typical scenario for my home or work PC's, 
however, if it's an important production server I always run it on a 
test box first.

Good luck!