Newbie questions about updating

[cothrige]

On 9/7/07, Erich Dollansky <oceanare at pacific.net.sg> wrote:
> Hi,

Howdy, and thanks for the help.

[snip]
>
> > I have downloaded the FreeBSD 6.2 install discs and have finished the
>
> Just stick with 6.2 for the moment.

I had thought this might be the best method, and so figured I would
for some time anyway.  I am also running FreeBSD on an ancient laptop
just for a learning experience, and because so far FreeBSD has been
the only system which seems able to run on it :-).  For this reason I
am tending to keep things fairly small and am trying not to make huge
updates unless I have to.

> > level?  If I don't want to run stable and use "tag=RELENG_6_2" will I
> > be required to keep the ports as they have installed from the disc?
> > Is there any connection between how current the ports are and how
> > current the OS is?
> >
> Wait, you do not install ports from the disc, you install packages from
> the disc. This is a small difference. Ports are source based, packages
> are binaries.

Sorry.  What I really had in mind was the ports tree itself, which I
had an option during install to add.  BTW, I answered yes to this and
so had that which was on the 6.2 install disc.  Based on the other
responses, it is looking like perhaps that is not the best method, and
maybe I should have skipped that and then added the ports after the
install using cvsup or such.  This is certainly a good thing to know
for the future, though as of right now I am dealing with the disc
install method.

> > One of the things which caused me to wonder about this was that some
> > time back I tried FreeBSD out for a while and ran into some oddities
> > concerning the ports system.  When I first finished setting things up
> > I could install packages using "pkg_add -r", but noticed that after
> > updating the ports I could no longer do that.  That struck me as odd,
>
> Updating the ports tree means actually switching to ports but you still
> can use packages via "portupgrade".

What has happened to me before is that after the fresh install if I
typed "pkg_add -r foo" it would say something like "fetching
http://...freebsd-6.[x]/foo.1.0.0.tbz..."  and then install it.  But,
after I would update the ports if I typed the same command, "pkg_add
-r foo", it would fail saying something like "fetching
http://...freebsd-6.[x]/foo.1.0.1.tbz..." and then say something about
no such package.  At the time it was happening I had looked at the
address being used and of course in the one for freebsd-6.whatever (or
whichever directory my OS was trying to fetch from) there was only the
foo.1.0.0 file and not the new one.  The ports upgrade seemed to make
my system stop searching for foo.1.0.0 and begin looking for 1.0.1,
but it did not change where the pkg_add program looked and so it would
always fail.

Most of the time this would be no big deal, and I don't run KDE, Gnome
or such, but it is more time consuming (especially on some of my old
stuff like this laptop) and more importantly it just always made me
think it was broken.  It really just doesn't seem like the intended
behaviour with it looking for nonexistent packages.  When things seem
to misbehave like that I always have a sneaking suspicion that not too
long in the future it will come crashing down as I have some
fundamental setting flawed and with every install or change I am
compounding the problem.

> Never forget, the ports tree is a live object. It can happen that you
> upgrade now and find a ruined system, then upgrade a minute later and
> the system is fine again.

Yes, I can see how that would be the case, and in a broken port I
think that likely this may be so.  Also, if the package system does
not operate after updating ports then I could also rest easy that
things are operating as they should.  However, my reading of the
handbook, and other documents, implies that one should in theory be
able to use packages even with an updated ports tree, as portupgrade
-P would seem to suggest.  But, in the past that would always fail as
the package does not exist in the place being searched and then a port
would be built.  Again, building is usually fine, and I may even
prefer it most of the time, but since portupgrade seems to exist to
work with updated ports trees, and it has options to use packages, my
experiences with these in the past have given me the distinct
impression that I have been doing something wrong.


> > One last newb question is concerning cvsup itself.  In reference to
> > ports is there a difference, in the end, between this and portsnap?
>
> There should be no difference at the final end.

Good to know.

> Erich

Thanks Erich.

Patrick