pkgng: how to upgrade a single port?

[Paul Mather]

On Nov 4, 2013, at 5:15 PM, Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Yes, all the things you've said are correct.
> 
> But once that's all said and done, you're still going to end up
> occasionally (or not so occasionally) hitting issues where upgrading a
> package without upgrading the dependencies ends up _breaking_ things.

I am not disagreeing with any of that, nor am I advocating updating dependent packages without updating dependencies that are also required to be updated.  (As I said, it is the job of the solver to determine what must be updated.)  But, there are also times when you have disjoint sets of packages where you would like to update one without updating the other.  It would be nice if there was an obvious way to do that.  (There's a way to do it, but the command name is somewhat unintuitive.)

> A lot of what makes yum/apt/etc work is because they have a stable
> package set and this hides all of the crap surrounding dependency
> changing hell. Things are much more exciting if you run debian-testing
> though (ie, you get exactly what you described with openjdk /
> apache-solr.)

Things can get exciting running ports at times. :-)  But, if there's one thing I rely on pkg to do for me it is to keep track of that dependency-changing hell.  If it tells me I need to update a dependency and I ignore it, I expect bad things to happen.  That is regardless of how stable or volatile the package set is.

I have always admired the NetBSD pkgsrc Quarterly releases, which is close to getting a -STABLE package set on *BSD.  Has there ever been discussion of a slower-moving Ports set for FreeBSD that only gets security updates?  That would be a nice middle ground between the glacial progress of RHEL Yum packages and the -CURRENT like Ports as it is right now.

Cheers,

Paul.