portmaster best practices

[illoai at gmail.com]

On 23 January 2012 05:32, Victor Sudakov <vas at mpeks.tomsk.su> wrote:
> Hello portmaster users,
>
> If portaudit shows that some installed packages have vulnerabilities,
> what do you usually do?
>
> Do you upgrade only the vulnerable packages, or vulnerable packages
> and dependent packages (portmaster -r), or perhaps all packages
> (portmaster -a)? Or do you "pkg_delete -a" all packages first and then
> reinstall from scratch (from `portmaster --list-origins` perhaps)?
>
> I am a bit uneasy about "portmaster -a" because, for example, in the
> output below it intends to install a package which is already
> installed:
>
>
> pg01-sibptus# portmaster -n -a
> ===>>> Gathering distinfo list for installed ports
>
> [dd]
>        Upgrade php5-ldap-5.3.5_1 to php5-ldap-5.3.9
>        Install net/openldap24-sasl-client
>        Upgrade postgresql-server-9.0.1 to postgresql-server-9.0.6_3
>        Upgrade tcl-8.5.9 to tcl-8.5.11
>        Upgrade vim-7.3.81 to vim-7.3.121
>        Install devel/gettext
>
> ===>>> Proceed? y/n [y] n
>
> ===>>> If you would like to upgrade or install some, but not
>       all of the above try adding '-i' to the command line.
> pg01-sibptus#
> pg01-sibptus#
> pg01-sibptus# pkg_info -xo openldap
> Information for openldap-sasl-client-2.4.24:
>
> Origin:
> net/openldap24-client

As I general rule, I don't run "portmaster -a"
Variations on -r usually succeed (-R -r is
quite useful), though if it pulls in too many
very large dependencies (firefox, chrome, open-
or libre-office, most anything KDE/QT), I'll
sometimes remove those before starting a
"portmaster -R -r" type of run.

It does require more typing to hand-specify
the ports to be upgraded, but I end up with
far fewer "Whoops!" moments.

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