portupgrade and freebsd-update: A better way?

[Scot Hetzel]

On 12/11/08, 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?
>
If you have the compat6x port installed, you will not need to upgrade
any of the 200+ ports on those productions servers.

If you upgrade one port, you'll then need to upgrade all of it
dependencies, as well as the ports that depend on these dependencies.

To minimize your down time, you should set up a port build server that
will build these 200+ ports as packages.  On the production systems,
you would use portupgrade to install the pre-built packages

Scot