port upgrading

[Roland Smith]

On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 06:29:17PM +0200, Dick Hoogendijk wrote:
> Question: what is best used to have an up2date ports collection nowadays?
> This system is FreeBSD8/amd64.

IMO if you don't mind compiling your own ports, use portsnap and
portmaster. The sequence is like this;

1) Run `portsnap fetch update`, but see (a).
2) Read /usr/ports/UPDATING, and see if any additions to the top of the file
   apply to you. If so, take appropriate action.
3) If you have local patches to the ports tree, re-apply them if
   necessary. This is not really recommended but can be handy sometimes.
4) Run `portmaster -a -B -d`

(a) When you run portsnap for the first time, or if you have damaged or
    deleted the contents of /var/db/portsnap, use 'portsnap fetch extract'
    instead.

For me this is part of the weekly routine. Keep an eye on
http://www.freshports.org/ to see if there are interesting changes for you.

If you are upgrading to another major version of FreeBSD (say 7.x to 8.x),
make a list of all used ports with `portmaster -l >ports.list`. Then delete
all ports before updating the system. After the update, re-install the 'root'
and 'leaf' ports from ports.list.

Hope this helps.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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