Still having trouble with package upgrades

[RW]

On Wed, 7 Mar 2012 11:28:47 -0500
David Jackson wrote:


> One faulty argument I heard was that it is often not a good idea to
> upgrade to new software release.

This is an argument that you appear to have completely misunderstood.
The point of suggesting that you use release package is that it's a
workaround for your problems, and minor releases are not all that far
apart. 


> As for compile options, the solution is simple, compile in all feature
> options and the most commonly used settings into the binary packages,
> for the standard i386 CPU. 

Surely that would be the standard amd64.


> A good software philosophy is to allow software to work out of the
> box with as little configuration as possible, but allow everything to
> be configured by the user if they want, by shipping software with
> reasonable defaults which can be overridden by the user. Make simple
> things easy and complicated things doable. In GUI, by default,
> complexity can be hidden from users, but if people want fine grain
> control, they should be free to use advanced screens of the GUI to
> get complex, fine grained control. In GUI design, more commonly used
> settings can be provided more upfront while advanced features for use
> by experts can be placed deeper in advanced or expert screens oft the
> GUI. Everything should be able to be configured or accomplished by
> both GUI and CLI and API.

Are aware that FreeBSD is mostly a server OS? 


> doing any system wide all at once OS-release upgrades at all. There
> is no reason why kernel and userland programs have to be upgraded at
> the same time... The idea of  waiting on a FreeBSD kernel release to
> upgrade firefox is absurd, and the idea that firefox must be upgraded
> during a kernel upgrade is also absurd. 

You don't have to do that, that's complete nonsense.


> There really should be little reason for release upgrades anymore
> these days, when the different parts of the system can be upgraded
> independantly through a binary package management tool, including
> kernel and user programs.
> 
> When a new kernel is released, there is no reason to reinstall all of
> the packages on the system at the same time. 

You reinstall packages because there are major library changes
when you cross  a major base-system release.