New ports on older stable (4.11)

[Greg Barniskis]

Vivek Khera wrote:
> 
> On Mar 1, 2006, at 6:05 AM, Pete French wrote:
> 
>> I dont know how backward compatible ports are ggenerally, but I
>> have a 4.11 machine that I really want to upgrade the ports on.
>> But I dont know if they will alla ctually compile, and I dont wnat to
>> start doing the process only to find that I cant build one of them
>> possibly. Does anybody know if this is likely to work, or is it
>> simply unsupported ?
> 
> i have several 4.11 machines in service with ports mostly up-to-date.  
> what you can do is cd to the port and run "make". If it builds chances 
> are it will work, then you can do the  necessary port upgrades.

I've done a similar thing on a creaky old P-III lab router/firewall 
that didn't really need replacing before death, was too slow to 
bother with religiously updating, yet still needed some degree of 
ports currency for specific lab scenarios. Using portversion to 
preview what needs making and portupgrade -aF to prefetch the 
sources  (after doing cvsup ports and make fetchindex) can help 
streamline your trial and error process.

The OP had spake thusly in a prior msg:
> Never used portupgrade and am not really in the mood for investigating
> exciting new software at the same time as the upgrade. 

With sysadmin mood having a lot of influence re: success rates, do 
what you like, of course. But portupgrade and friends (and 
competitors) can save you a lot of time and grief.

On the other hand, I'm not sure it'd be very happy when you first 
fire it up on an old box where a lot of manual ports management has 
already occurred, and cleaning up a messed package database is 
probably the least fun aspect of portupgrade. The best time to learn 
it might be the next time you do a clean install of say, 6.1.

-- 
Greg Barniskis, Computer Systems Integrator
South Central Library System (SCLS)
Library Interchange Network (LINK)
<gregb at scls.lib.wi.us>, (608) 266-6348