Upgrading packages using binaries

[Bjarne Wichmann Petersen]

On Wednesday 27 April 2005 22:09, Kris Kennaway wrote:

> > The problem as far as I can tell is, that the portstree and
> > ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-5-stable/All/ aren't in
> > sync.
> They're never perfectly in sync and never can be, because computers
> aren't infinitely fast.

I'm not expecting them to be. 

> > My question: is there any way to upgrade packages to the latest available
> > version on the mirrors
> Yes, you're using it.

In theory, yes. But in practice, no. I've just spend an entire day upgrading 
my ports/packages, constantly keeping my eye on portupgrade so I could fix 
the many stumblingblocks that came during the process. 

Portupgrades "fallback" to download from ../Latest/. Several times the latest 
port didn't meet the version requirement, that portupgrade demanded, so 
portupgrade bails out. I had to build several ports before portupgrade would 
continue with the binary upgrade.

Less than optimal, and a waste of bandwith, since portupgrade repeatedly 
downloaded "outdated" packages from the mirrors.

> > and/or a way to cvsup the portstree to the version the
> > binary packages have been built from?
> No, sorry.  Usually the -stable packages don't get so far behind,
> except around release time when all the build activity goes there.  I
> just finished a build and updated them though, so you should be able
> to retry once your favourite mirror has updated.

Would it be possible to check the version of the available package 
in ../Latest/ BEFORE downloading? Because then one could compare it with the 
local installed version and download and install if it were a newer version?

Bjarne