upgrading installed ports: time to do it ?

Chris Whitehouse cwhiteh at onetel.com
Tue Jun 23 21:39:14 UTC 2009


Jerry wrote:
> On Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:58:41 +0100
> Chris Whitehouse <cwhiteh at onetel.com> wrote:
> 
>> I'll probably get flamed for this but since I've been using 
>> ports-mgmt/portmanager I've almost forgotten
>> about /usr/ports/UPDATING and all that pkgdb -Fu stuff or whatever it
>> was. I've upgraded ports just by doing 'portmanager -u' over one or
>> two quite major changes and not had any problems that haven't been
>> down to an individual ports.
>>
>> I've never seen any reasons given for not using portmanager, just it 
>> seems to be getting quietly deprecated, which is a shame because it 
>> works supremely well.
>>
>> Having said that why not check out
>> http://freebsd-custom.wikidot.com/, the new binary ports upgrade
>> system and save yourself a bunch of compile time.
>>
>> Chris
> 
> I use it myself, It "just works". I would also add "-p -l" to the
> command line. that way you have a log created if something does go
> wrong. It will also fix up any outdated dependencies.

I do use logging. In fact I do 'portmanager -s > somefile', extract a 
list of ports to be upgraded and run the list through a loop which does 
'make config' for each port, _then_ run 'portmanager -l -u' so it runs 
completely unattended. It does indeed "just works" which is down to the 
way it works out to do leaf ports first and work backwards.

portmaster looks like it has some nice features, including doing all the 
configs first, but I don't know if it does as good a job as portmanager 
in deciding what order to do things.

Chris



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