portupgrade and freebsd-update: A better way?

[Garrett Cooper]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 7:13 PM, Peter Beckman <beckman at angryox.com> wrote:
> So I took on binary upgrading one of my FreeBSD servers today from
> 6.2-RELEASE to 7.0-RELEASE.  Many useful sites outline exactly how to do
> this right, and they are mostly useful.
>
> Except when it comes to ports.
>
>
>  http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2007-11-11-freebsd-major-version-upgrade.html
>    http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-freebsd-server-upgrades/
>
> You get a few production servers with 200+ ports installed, and upgrading
> could take several days and lots of headaches and a lot of babysitting.
>
> Is there some sort of automated way that someone smart has figured out how
> to determine which ports are actually affected by the upgrade, so I only
> have to upgrade a hopefully small subset of installed ports?  Are ALL the
> libraries upgraded during the OS upgrade modified in a way that breaks ALL
> existing ports?  My gut says no, but my brain says it's not trivial to
> match the two together to limit the number of times you have to rebuild a
> port.
>
> Is there a better way?  Does portsnap or portmanager or portupgrade keep
> track?  What have I missed?
>
> Beckman

7.x and 6.2 aren't ABI compatible, so unfortunately no, you have to
babysit a bit.
-Garrett