Upgrading to 7.0 - stupid requirements

[Oliver Fromme]

Hello Marko,

I'm very sorry that you have trouble updating your FreeBSD
installation, but there are very good technical reasons to
update your packages, as others have already explained in
detail (i.e. library conflicts).

When I updated my home workstation from FreeBSD 6 to 7,
I used the opportunity to clean up my installed packages,
which was long overdue anyway.

First I saved the output from "pkg_info" in a file.  Then
I edited it and removed everything that I don't need.
There was lots of superfluous crap in it, like ports that
I installed once out of curiosity but never continued to
use them, and ports that were installed as a dependency
once but aren't required anymore because the dependent
software is long gone.

Then I did "pkg_delete \*", checked for left-overs in
/usr/local because not everything was removed cleanly,
and then installed the ports from my text file again.
I chose to compile from ports instead of installing
precompiled packages because the machine is fairly fast
(if you have a slow machine, installing packages will
be much faster, of course).

It certainly went a lot quicker than if I had blindly
updated all ports without cleaning up.  And now all of
my installed packages are guaranteed to be fresh and
up to date, and I only have the stuff on my harddisk
that I really need.

Really, such situations where you should update all of
your packages is the best opportunity to clean up the
mess that has accumulated on your disk in a long time.
I recommend that everyone considers doing that, too,
instead of blindly running portupgrade.  Of course,
the latter would work, too, but it takes longer and
will rather add to the mess instead of cleaning it. ;-)

Best regards
   Oliver

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Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing b. M.
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