portmaster best practices

[Roland Smith]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 05:32:33PM +0700, Victor Sudakov wrote:
> Hello portmaster users,
> 
> If portaudit shows that some installed packages have vulnerabilities,
> what do you usually do?

It depends on the vulnerability and what the package does. I will de-install
it if I think that the vulnerability is critical for me and there is no
workaround.

Look at freshports [http://www.freshports.org/commits.php] regularly to see if
updates for vulnerable packages are available.

Generally I like to run 'portsnap fetch update' followed by 'portmaster -ai'
(after reading /usr/ports/UPDATING) every week. This keeps the number of huge
compilefests (like gettext updates :-() to a minimum.

For efficiency, I tend to keep one machine up-to-date in that way, and use
rsync to then distribute the changes in /usr/local to my other machines. This
only works for machines that are on the same major FreeBSD version and
architecture, of course.

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