New user confused by need to do huge upgrade

[Ronald Klop]

On Tue, 08 Nov 2005 00:49:18 +0100, Alistair  
<alistair at tyeurgain.free-online.co.uk> wrote:

> Hello, All
>
> I am a user of Linux for many years (and an aged BSD sysadmin from  
> 1985-1989), but laterly mainly use Gentoo.  FreeBSD seemed to be a good  
> alternative, so I get the 6.0 release a few days after it was released.
>
> Being a Gentoo person, I like the ports system, but with limited time on  
> my hands, I also like the compiled packages.  I can get a working system  
> from packages then compile my own ports as need or want be.  Or so I  
> thought.
>
> I installed from two CDs, and got a working KDE system.  Now, I want to  
> do Firefox from ports with my own make.conf for P4 optimisation.  Good!  
>   So, I sync with the sources using cvsup (just like emerge --sync)  
> change to the Firefox ports directory, type "make" and enter dependency  
> hell like has never been known before.  Everything that depends upon  
> GTK2 must be updated before Firefox can be compiled!
>
> I thought that FreeBSD would be more stable than Gentoo and Linux  
> distros in general.  I now find that there is the most major release  
> step (5.4 to 6.0) and within a matter of a few days later, both Gnome  
> and KDE are subject to huge updates that require many hours (or maybe  
> days - it's not done yet) of CPU time.
>
> Maybe I am missing something.  However, I just cannot see why this is  
> right. What I thought that FreeBSD would give me that Gentoo did not is  
> a coherent system within which deveopment was co-ordinated. Instead, I  
> seem to find the opposite.  The core group can offer a major release of  
> the OS, while missing the fact that two hugely important development  
> groups are just days off their own major releases.

The portstree is tagged for a release, so if you cvsup to the tag for the  
release, you get the 'supported' ports. If you cvsup to the most recent  
portstree there is always a change for a big update.

The idea behind the KDE/GNOME update is to commit the stuff after the  
6.0-RELEASE in stead of before too have stable KDE/GNOME packages in the  
release.

BTW: use the port sysutils/portupgrade. This fixes a lot of dependency  
troubles.
BTW2: if you cvsup to the latest portstree, you can't expect everything to  
be available in packages. In FreeBSD ports are the focus, packages come  
next (currently).
BTW3: http://www.freshports.org/

Ronald.

-- 
  Ronald Klop
  Amsterdam, The Netherlands