How did upgrading applications happen before portupgrade etc?

[Tobias Roth]

Kris Kennaway wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 11, 2007 at 12:03:33PM +0400, Rakhesh Sasidharan wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Just a question that struck me today. Before there were the portupgrade 
>> and other tools for upgrading installed applications to their newer 
>> versions, how did things work out?
>>
>> Did one upgrade applications through a series of "make deinstall 
>> reinstall" commands (I wonder if these commands take care of dependencies 
>> too) or was there any other way?
> 
> Basically that, plus a lot of other manual steps that were always
> somewhat hard to get exactly right but which more or less worked back
> in the days when Gnomes lived in your garden and Java was a place on
> the map.  It was a simpler, more innocent age.

There was pkg_version -c that printed a sequence of

cd /usr/ports/foo/bar
make
make deinstall
make install
make clean

or something like that. Whatever broke was fixed manually afterwards :-)
Oh, and there was no UPDATING in /usr/ports/ as well I think.