Avoiding upgrade to xorg 7.2

Nikola Lecic nlecic at EUnet.yu
Thu Jun 14 20:17:31 UTC 2007


On Thu, 14 Jun 2007 11:42:45 +0200
Bram Moolenaar <Bram at moolenaar.net> wrote:

> Glad to hear you have good experiences with the port system.  I do
> wonder how much downtime you have while updating the ports.

Well, I normally don't have downtime at all. I update ports tree once in
1-3 days, which means I have ~10-20 ports to compile (desktop machine,
~850 ports installed). I just have to be a bit careful since this
machine is pretty slow, so I don't miss to 'portversion -v -L =' and
then:

  * I care not to compile openoffice, gimp, etc, use packages then
  * I use to do 'portupgrade -a' overnight (and that's enough)
  * sometimes I find useful to do partial upgrade without stopping any
    running application or my work during daytime (in most cases
    complete upgrade can be done even without turning X off -- but
    examine portversion listing to be sure)
  * if I'm out of home for a week and have to do bigger update, I use
    '-aP', except for several applications with custom options.

That's a routine, like morning coffee, takes <0.5% of time, and _never_
failed.

The most important, I'm speaking about my primary everyday desktop
machine I completely depend on and do all my work on it.

> I'm afraid my experiences are not so good.  Many times I got stuck
> halfway a port upgrade and somehow had to manually fix things.  I
> can't risk breaking my machine to a level where X11 won't start.  So
> I'm very careful with updating ports.  And I can't wait for a couple
> of days for builds to finish (not to mention that there is very often
> something wrong, such as running out of disk space, a file that can't
> be downloaded, etc.).

I don't experience such things because my ports tree is always
up-to-date. But it is normal if you mix old and new packages, of
course.

When I say that ports system is perfect and amazing, I mean that,
through the flow of ~17.000 pieces of software, it works in any given
moment with nearly 0 chance to fail. And besides that, it is so
sophisticated (unlike crude and simplified package managements
available elsewhere) that you can do any imaginable and subtle tuning
at the same place, if you want.

I've never experienced such stability (and possibilities) on Linux
desktop machines (speaking from a very long experience).

That's why I find your complaints about FreeBSD's ports system
unacceptable and I don't understand why you don't use cosiness and
security it offers. He who wants to randomly mix versions is free to do
it by hand, without ports.

> The only policy that appears to work for me is to wait for a new
> FreeBSD release, install it and then update the ports I use.  This
> takes a couple of days, so I only do this twice a year.  Generally,
> after a month or so the dependencies get so complicated that when
> updating a small port triggers rebuilding nearly everything.

Doing regular maintaining of ports tree (as I described) is much
easier (and less time consuming) than what you do.

As of big Xorg upgrade, use '-aP'; it will not take that long. Or even
better, since you probably has a mess of old and new ports, deinstall
everything and start anew with a fresh ports tree (again, don't compile
if a package exists).

Nikola Lečić


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