Upgrading the Installed package

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 01:51:33AM -0800 I heard the voice of
Jeremy Chadwick, and lo! it spake thus:
> 
> So let's tell Navneet exactly what he's getting into, shall we?

OK, but let's do that by telling him what he's getting into, not vague
gestures at overblown half-truths.


>   - Ruby is not included in the base system; you have to install it
>     from ports (read: just another thing to have to maintain...)

My workstation has about 800 ports installed.  A relatively lean
server has 300.  1 more is so deep in the noise, you can't hardly
measure it, much less see it.


> ports base system:
>   - C-based, and includes all of the pkg_* utilities.  Nearly every
>     FreeBSD user/administrator is familiar with these tools.

Can't upgrade things.  Show me how I use pkg_* to upgrade a package
(let's say, gtk), and have all the metadata set right afterward.

Requires either stupid amounts of manual work, or a lot of scripting
(I upgrade perl.  How do I rebuild p5-*?).


> portupgrade:
>   - Maintains its own database of ports installed, dependencies, and
>     so on -- COMPLETELY separate from that of the ports base system.

Which is just a cache of the existing files, and can be blown away at
any time with no consequences other than a minute or two remaking
them.


>   - Said database must be kept in sync with ports base system
>     dependencies and other whatnots; and if they go out of sync

Which it rebuilds when it notices is out of date.  The only time I've
had problems out of it in years of using portupgrade is when I do
something like update BDB (or less often, portupgrade or ruby-bdb).
Whoopie.  Consider the recent case involving sudo and portmaster; when
you use a tool to update a low-level piece of itself, you have to take
some care how you go about it.


>   - Said database is Berkeley DB-based, which means you have to install
>     Oracle/Sleepycat BDB from ports.  (I believe you can pick DB1.x
>     which comes with libc, but it's not recommended due to bugs).

So now we're up to 4 ports to install?  If you can make that my
biggest worry, I'll sent you a ginormous certified check first thing
in the morning.



There are a lot of things to hate in portupgrade, but let's don't pile
handwaving anthills into mountains on top of that.


-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.