the reason for upgraded pkgs

[Matthew Seaman]

On 08/03/2014 20:23, eocene wrote:
> I'm new to freebsd, running 10.0.
> 
> With pkg upgrade, is there a way to know what the reasons are behind
> each upgraded package? For instance, "This fixes security problem
> such-and-such", "This one fixes this handful of bugs", "This one
> brings these new features, has these new configuration options, etc."

You get some information from pkg upgrade, but it's mostly about
packages that were reinstalled for indirect reasons -- because a package
they depend on was upgraded.  Packages that are upgraded directly don't
have any sort of explanation accessible through pkg(8).  But direct
upgrades only occur when there's a new version available.

If you want to find out why a new version is available, then there are
two main resources:

    pkg audit

Running this *before* upgrading will flag up any packages you have
installed that have know security vulnerabilities.  Usually that means
there will be an upgrade to the vulnerable package, but sometimes that
can be delayed for a few days.

   http://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/, or equivalently the
   SVN-Ports-All mailing list

These allow you to see the commit messages for any updates to the ports
you're interested in.  These should describe what changed about the port
in that commit -- which may just say 'upgraded to version foo' when
pulling in an update from upstream.  Many committers will put a pointer
to any change logs or release notes for a version upgrade, or include a
summary of what changed with the new version, but this is not a practice
universally followed.

A large number of updates at the moment are due to infrastructure
changes within the ports itself, much of which has been inspired by the
advent of pkg(8) and the imminent demise of the old pkg_tools.  There's
going to be quite a lot of this sort of activity going forwards over the
next year or two as the switch to pkg(8) allows a number of ideas which
the ports has been in great need of finally to be implemented.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey


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