portupgrade -- is there a way to only build and update ports that actually NEED it?

[Damien Fleuriot]

On 6/25/12 9:53 AM, Dan Mahoney, System Admin wrote:
> Hey there,
> 
> I'm presently in the process of trying to do a portupgrade from rt-3.8.8
> to 3.8.13.  By all estimations, this is a minor bump.
> 
> Already, I've encountered several annoyances due to ABI changes, such as
> the libtool2.4 fun.  With normal portupgrade, this forces you to go fix
> the dependent port.
> 
> Finally, I just applied -r, which should update all dependent packages,
> but it seems to upgrade them unconditionally.
> 
> Ergo, I've since built a new version of perl, a new verion of python,
> rebuilt every perl module on the system, am presently rebuilding
> apache22, and I'm sure the system will turn around and require me to
> rebuild postgres real soon.
> 
> You would think there's an option to portupgrade that says "don't
> upgrade every single package I've got, but if somewhere in the
> dependency chain I need a newer version of a thing, then do it."
> 
> Am I just missing it in the manpages, or does such a thing really not
> exist?
> 
> -Dan
> 

We've been happily using portmanager for ages, it does just that :)