Upgrade questions

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <4813C594.4070006 at pingle.org>, you wrote:

>Have you ever updated your world and kernel?

Kernel, yes.  I've built and intalled new kernels.  But world?  No.
Never had the guts to try that.  Much easier just to find a new spare
drive and download and install the -RELEASE de jure on it.

> From the errors you are seeing, it might indicate that a newer version of 
>the package management tools are in need. At the very least, you can try to 
>uninstall portupgrade and reinstall it from your new ports tree. I thought 
>there was a port that would update these (ports-mgmt/pkg_install maybe?) in 
>older installations.

OK.  I may try that... *if* I don't first wimp out, and just plop 7.0-RELEASE
onto a new blank drive first.  (I may end up just doing that for other reasons,
but I _would_ like to understand ports better.  I just feel like my current
frustration/education ratio isn't quite where I would have liked it to be for
this "simple" upgrading task.)

>> Help me out a little here.  Educate me.  Please.  Teach a man to fish.  How
>> does one deal with situations like this, i.e. some package wants Version X
>> of package P, but what you have installed in version Y, and about eight
>> zillion things that depend on that (version Y).
>
>If you have portupgrade installed, you can force an upgrade or reinstall 
>like so:

Yeabut "force upgrade" sounds to me too much like trying to fix a disk
drive that's making too much noise via juducious use of a hammer.  (I guess
I'm just old-fashioned that way.)

Won't a "forced upgrade" effectively break more than it is likely to cure?

>If you are worried about dependency tracking, pkgdb -L will restore lost 
>dependencies, but *do* *not* *run* *this* *before* *updating* *xorg* to 7.3. 
>It will severely mess things up.

I seem to have already woirked my into into a "severly messed up" state on
my own volition, so there's probably not much more I could break that I
haven't already rendered useless anyway.
(1/2 :-)

>> After all these years of using FreeBSD without ever really understanding
>> the ports system, I really would like to finally learn how to use it
>> properly, but at this point I'm about this far -><- away from just
>> through in the towel, finding a spare drive someplace, and just loading
>> up 7.0-RELEASE on it, just to avoid his "twisty maze of little error
>> messages, all different".
>
>Because your ports are from before the major X.org revision, that may be a 
>valid course of action. It would certainly involve a lot less hair pulling.

Yea.  And I like my hair, so that may be the way I go.

Besides which, as I understand it, 7.x has all sorts of better support for
multi-threading/SMP... so if I install it, then I can brag to all of my
friends about how efficient and modern it is at using all of the multiple
cores that I don't even have yet. :-)

>I'm not sure if portsnap supports reverting back to a specific date, but it 
>might be a good idea to somehow (csup, possibly) revert your ports tree to 
>shortly after the X.org 7.2 changeover and try to update to that point.

Why would I want to do that?

That sounds like a rather odd suggestion.