Updates / Upgrades

[Akenner]

Hi all,

I have installed FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE
 on two of my systems. One of them (This one I'm using) is a PC I use as 
one of my main desktops. The other I decided on after wanting to keep 
safe with my main one which has important data on it, so I decided to 
use another machine and do an install so I could test out patches and 
updates on it before applying them to this machine so that if something 
happened during the updates I wouldn't lose this machine and could just 
format the other machine if something really crashed or had a really 
huge error, and basically use this machine as production and that one as 
the test for things so I don't break / screw up anything.

Anyway, I used a tool like this:

#update-scan

It gave me a list of ports and things to update and how to do it. Thing 
is, when I took the advice of what the application said, and did what it 
said, it still shows it.

I moved over to the test machine and grabbed the application and ran it 
to see what I could do, and noticed I did miss the first step, so I 
figured that was the problem, and used my test machine to do an update 
for Perl. I saw it had two things to do to upgrade those packages, so I 
did step one, then, did step two.

I figured this would remove it from the list of packages that need an 
upgrade, and after a few hours of downloading some stuff off my FTP 
server (MP3s, no software) I rebooted the machine.

I was surprised to find Perl still listing to do the exact same thing. 
So this time I did this:

portupgrade -a

It said I needed to run the pkgdb thing, so I did.

Once it finished and fixed up a few apps that needed something or other, 
I ran it again:

portupgrade -a

After a while, it started going and I figured everything would be done 
and I could update my main box after checking to be sure that the 
patches didn't break anything.

Trouble is, after the reboot, I noticed that it still listed all of them.

I'm almost certain the problem is me. So my question is, what am I doing 
wrong? I'm no guru or BSD hacker, but I am a competent user of Unix 
systems and can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.

I'm a LITTLE new to doing on the fly upgrades like this I'll admit. 
Before I'd just wait for a new version of FreeBSD to come out, like say 
6.0 - 6.x and just do a fresh install after backing up the small things 
I need and call it a day.

So can someone please either type, copy and paste, or link me, to some 
info on doing updates and upgrades and patches so I can keep my system 
updated?

BOTH machines are running FreeBSD-7.1-RELEASE and both have almost the 
same software installed on them. I'd like to find out because I'm really 
enjoying 7.1, it has to be by far the best release I've used to date.

portupgrade -a used to do all this for me and take a while, but I'm not 
sure what is going on with this one.

Thanks for any help,

-Allen