[freebsd-questions] Looking @ upgrades mechanisms...

[Mel]

On Tuesday 02 December 2008 09:04:56 Beech Rintoul wrote:
> On Monday 01 December 2008 21:43:08 Javier Vasquez wrote:
> > On 12/2/08, Javier Vasquez <jevv.cr at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I was reading chapter 4 of the handbook, as well as chapters 24 and
> > > 26...  If I got it clear, I pretty much might get the base system
> > > updated by using freebsd-update script.  Ports collection can get
> > > updated with portsnap, but that doesn't update neither the installed
> > > ports, nor the installed packages.  To upgrade the installed ports,
> > > portmanager or portmaster or portupgrade can be used...  However only
> > > portupgrade can be used to upgrade packages, right?
>
> Not sure about the others, I use portupgrade myself. But yes, you can
> update packages with portupgrade.
>
> > > Now, can something like "portupgrade -a -PP" to upgrade all packages
> > > without building a thing (might be that some don't get updated due to
> > > the lack of binary package yet, and in such case would dependencies be
> > > managed right)?
>
> Not sure what you mean by managed, but if there's no package there would be
> no dependent ports downloaded. If you do a portupgrade -aP (single "P") it
> will go look for a package then compile it if it's not available. Compiling
> really isn't that bad even on an 800MHz box.

Portupgrade -PP is detrimental for bandwidth. It's not really portupgrade's 
fault (well, partially, it shouldn't offer the feature), because it will 
quite often download Latest/foo.tbz, unpack it entirely and then say "oops, I 
downloaded this useless package which is older or equal to what you have 
installed". 
When i started writing my own tools I quickly realized that the buildserver 
needs an index of the /packages/ it has.
-- 
Mel

Problem with today's modular software: they start with the modules
    and never get to the software part.