Is it O.K. to use the 7.0 ports tree on 6.3 ?

Kris Kennaway kris at FreeBSD.org
Sat Nov 24 05:17:50 PST 2007


Pete French wrote:
>> You've already received the right advice about not renaming the INDEX,
>> but I think it's also worth mentioning that untar'ing a static picture
>> of the ports tree is of little practical value unless you never plan
>> to update the base, and you never plan to update any ports on that
>> machine.
> 
> Sorrty, but I do not understand this at all. Surely untarring the ports
> file is exactly what the installer does when you install BSD onto a machine?
> Why is doing it by hand any different ?
> 
>> You're much better off starting with downloading the tree with csup,
>> that way you can maintain it more easily down the road.
> 
> Won't running csup on the tree I just untarred work ? I use csup
> (and have used cvsup in the past) to update ports trees on machines
> I installed from CD, and it works fine. Unless the installer is doing
> something other than simply untarring that file I can't see why it isn't
> just going to work in the same way.

Yes, it definitely will not work.  When files are deleted from the ports 
tree after your initial tarball extraction, c[v]sup will not notice that 
they are missing (since it does not have a baseline), and will not 
remove them.  Thus, you will encounter ports with "stale" patches that 
no longer apply, or apply but break the compilation, etc.

There is a FAQ about this on the cvsup webpage on www.polstra.com that 
explains in detail.

Kris



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