A possibly odd upgrade question

[andrew clarke]

On Wed 2011-05-04 12:50:05 UTC-0400, Chris Brennan (xaero at xaerolimit.net) wrote:

> I have an old PIII running FreeBSD7.3 currently, ports is all kinds of
> screwed up, when I did my first cross-version upgrade from 6.x to 7.x, I
> didn't know I had to rebuild ports, I subsequently upgrades though every
> version upto to 7.3. Ports is still FUBAR, half of them no longer work. So
> my question is this, now I know for the future to upgrade ports after every
> upgrade, is it safe to nuke /usr/local (excluding  /usr/local/home), rebuild
> world/kernel for 8.2 and start with a fresh ports tree?

You only need to rebuild all your ports after a "major" FreeBSD
upgrade, eg. 6.x to 7.x, or 7.x to 8.x.

Deleting /usr/local is a bit of an extreme step.  You can run
pkg_delete -av to delete all installed ports.

Starting with a fresh ports tree is probably only necessary if your
ports tree is very out of date.  Only because if it's stale it could
take longer to update it with portsnap than to start the tree from
scratch.  Of course deleting an existing ports tree can also take a
while, too.

You shouldn't need to build world & kernel for 8.2 unless you need a
custom kernel or something else peculiar to your setup.  I have no way
of knowing, but I suspect most FreeBSD users just use freebsd-update
these days to install the premade binaries of world & kernel.

> I thought about a clean reinstall but this machine cannot boot from
> USB, both CD-ROM's are dead and have been disconnected to use IDE
> hard-drives and the floppy driver is dead as well.

You could put the boot HDD into another machine with a working CD-ROM,
install it onto that, then put the HDD back into the P3 when you're
done.  There's no requirement that the installation needs to be done
on the same machine it's going to ultimately boot from.

Do you actually need to upgrade to 8.x?  I'm not sure there's much to
gain from putting 8.x on an old P3...

Regards
Andrew