Portupgrade -af question

[Zoltan Frombach]

Thank you for your prompt reply! All of the mentioned conditions are true in 
my case, so I guess this is the way I'm gonna go. I have a few ports that I 
compile with custom command line options, but I can always re-compile those 
later just by issuing individual portupgrade -f portname commands. My main 
point is to shorten the downtime this server must suffer at the 
"upgradathon". ;-)

Again, thanks for confirming this!

Zoltan

> On Tue, 26 Oct 2004, Zoltan Frombach wrote:
>
>> Okay guys, this is my very first post to the list, so please be nice to 
>> me. ;-)
>>
>> I have a simple question. I currently have FreeBSD 5.2-CURRENT #3 (from 
>> May 9, 2004) installed on a semi-production server. I need to update it 
>> to 5.3-RELEASE when it becomes available. I've read in src/UPDATING that 
>> all installed ports must be rebuilt (after a successful build world and 
>> install world, of course). Someone suggested to use 'portupgrade -af' to 
>> rebuild all
>
> Don't forget the mergemaster step!
>
>> installed ports. But this would take a whole day, especially since it's 
>> just a single processor Pentium III system. Shouldn't it be faster to let 
>> portupgrade use pre-compiled packages (either from a 5.3-RELEASE install 
>> CD or from a remote site)? Something like: 'portupgrade -afP' ? Would it 
>> work? This would save a lot of time... a lot of down-time, in fact.
>
> This is guaranteed to work if:
> - Your ports skeleton is up to date.
> - This machine has HTTP and FTP access enabled.
> - The ports you are upgrading are not forbidden, deprecated or broken.
> - All distfiles are available from at least one of the relevant mirrors.
>
> This is the case because portupgrade -P searches for packages locally or 
> wherever PKG_PATH points to, tries to use pkg_fetch and then falls back to 
> updating from ports if precompiled packages are not available.
>
>> Can someone more experienced with portupgrade confirm that this would 
>> work? I would really appreciate either a firm yes or a firm no answer. I 
>> just need to know the answer to this question from someone who is more 
>> knowledgable than I am, before I start doing something stupid... ;-) 
>> Thank you guys, all!!
>
> "firm yes", but only if all of the above conditions are met.
>
> Have fun with this "upgradathon"! :-)
>
> Regards,
> Andy