portupgrade and freebsd-update: A better way?

[Garrett Cooper]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 10:25 PM, Scot Hetzel <swhetzel at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

True... forgot about compat6x.
-Garrett