A possibly odd upgrade question

Jerry jerry at seibercom.net
Wed May 4 18:26:30 UTC 2011


On Wed, 4 May 2011 12:50:05 -0400
Chris Brennan <xaero at xaerolimit.net> articulated:

> 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? 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. So it would seem an inline/online rebuild is my only upgrade
> solution but with ports in it's current state of FUBAR, it leaves me
> with the question of what to do with that too.
> 
> P.S. I've tried a portmaster/portsupgrade of ports, both met
> with disastrous results and with 193 current ports installed, over
> 75% of which is broke and isn't used any more ... I need to start over

Chris, when I have had to do major rebuilds, I have found
"portmanager" to be the best tool. It just seems to work. In any case,
if it were me, I would clean out the /usr/ports/distfiles directory,
update your ports tree, and then update you OS. When you are finished
with that fun chore, run; "portmanager -u -l -y -f". Depending on the
number of ports installed, it might take some time though. Obviously,
you need portmanager installed first. By the way, if you know you need
a distfile installed first, something like diablo-jdk or diablo-jre
that require you to have the distfile all ready in
the /usr/ports/distfiles directory prior to attempting to build the
port, then do that prior to updating your system and running
portmanager.

-- 
Jerry ✌
jerry+fbsd at seibercom.net

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