Curious...how often do *you* portupgrade(1) ?

[David Wolfskill]

>Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2004 17:08:00 -0600
>From: "Kevin D. Kinsey, DaleCo, S.P." <kdk at daleco.biz>
>To: chat at freebsd.org
>Subject: Curious...how often do *you* portupgrade(1) ?
>Sender: owner-freebsd-chat at freebsd.org

>Running a desktop box with a dialup PPP connection
>to the 'Net, my "portupgrade -aRr" tends to take a
>couple of days ....

Hmm....  You may find "portupgrade -aF" ("just fetch") useful during
periods when you don't especially want to destabilize the machine, but
you have connectivity.

>I'd taken to dealing with it once a month.

>It occurs to me that it might actually be less
>painful to do it more often ...

Maybe.  :-}

>What's your plan?

Well, I have 4 machines that are (mostly) at home.  (3 are at home; the
4th is my laptop, which is with me at work, though I'm writing from one
of the home machines via an ssh tunnel.)

I have the beginnings of some moderately-detailed notes on my approach
at http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/FreeBSD/upgrade.html.

Briefly, on my laptop and my (SMP) "build machine," I track each of
-STABLE and -CURRENT daily, and upgrade all of the ports on each daily.
(Each also has a copy of the FreeBSD CVS repository:  the laptop gets it
from the build machine, which gets it from one of the official mirrors.)
When I upgrade the ports on the build machine, I use the "-p" flag to
portupgrade, so it builds packages as it goes.

For some ports that take a long time to build (e.g., mozilla), after the
package is built on the build machine, I copy it (via scp) to my laptop,
then tell portpugrade on the laptop to take advantage of any packages it
finds locally.

Every week, I upgrade the ports on the other 2 machines by NFS-mounting
the build machine's "ports" directory on each.  Again, I tell
portupgrade to take advantage of any local packages.  Once this is done,
I clear /usr/ports/packages/* on the build machine.  For that matter,
once the build machine's duties are done for the day, I turn it off.

(These last 2 machines also track -STABLE about every couple of weeks,
using a snapshot built on the build machine.)

I've been doing this for a little over 2 years now, and it's been
working out fairly well for me so far.  For example, from the machine on
which this message is being composed:

bunrab(4.9-S)[11] uname -a
FreeBSD bunrab.catwhisker.org 4.9-STABLE FreeBSD 4.9-STABLE #60: Sun Feb  8 06:10:44 PST 2004     root at freebeast.catwhisker.org:/common/S1/obj/usr/src/sys/BUNRAB  i386
bunrab(4.9-S)[12] 

Peace,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david at catwhisker.org
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