Avoiding upgrade to xorg 7.2

Mark Kirkwood markir at paradise.net.nz
Thu Jun 14 23:52:47 UTC 2007


Bram Moolenaar wrote:
> Nikola Lecic wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Amazing.  My experiences are quite different.  But then, I do need
> openoffice, which takes about a whole day to build (and runs out of
> diskspace if I forget to clean up first).  This failed three times
> (files could not be downloaded) before it worked, so it took me five
> days to build openoffice last time.
> 
>>> 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.
> 
> I don't intentionally mix old and new packages.  But I sometimes get
> stuck with something that can't be uninstalled and have to forcefully
> install another version without deinstalling the old one.  That's bad
> of course, but sometimes there is no reasonable alternative.
> 
> Note that this is a development system, I sometimes need to install
> specific versions of autoconf, gtk, motif, etc.  And have programs
> compiled outside of the ports tree with them, thus can't delete some
> ports without breaking these programs.  It does mostly work OK, the
> ports system is often paranoid about installing two versions of the
> same port.
> 
>> I've never experienced such stability (and possibilities) on Linux
>> desktop machines (speaking from a very long experience).
> 
> On Linux you can at least often install binary packages.  I gave up on
> that for FreeBSD some time ago, it caused more problems than building
> from source (esp. that specific versions of packages were missing and
> building them from source then doesn't work either).  Building from
> source works better, but is more than 10 times slower.
> 
> One thing that amazes me: "make distclean" in /usr/ports is extremely
> slow, since it uses the dependencies and most ports get cleaned dozens
> of times.  Still need to do that, especially before building openoffice.
> 
>> 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).
> 
> "deinstall everything" is not an option, it means I can't work for a
> couple of days.  And will mean quite a few things I build outside the
> ports tree will stop working.
> 

Can you not kick off an reinstall everything last think on a Friday and 
have it ready for you on Monday? (you'll need to set BATCH=yes so you 
don't get asked to confirm config options). I usually do this myself 
whenever I upgrade (usually every 3 months or so).

In most cases you can keep working while the upgrade is happening (e.g I 
switch to enlightenment while Gnome is rebuilding etc). However in the 
case of this Xorg 7.2 upgrade and change from X11BASE to LOCALBASE I 
couldn't really do this, but I think this is not typical (I used a mac 
powerbook whilst my Freebsd box was rebuilding... glad to be back in 
Freebsd now!).

Note that it's not just Freebsd that is doing modular Xorg 7.x - Gentoo 
did it a while back.

Cheers

Mark



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