Utility for safe updating of ports in base system

[Sean C. Farley]

On Thu, 20 Mar 2008, Michel Talon wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 05:59:28PM +0800, Denise H. G. wrote:
>> Michel Talon <talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr> writes:
>>
>> Actually I don't think a batch download and install process would
>> help much, especially for a freshly installed system because it might
>> be a huge download job and much waiting time if one is going to
>> install GNOME/KDE etc. from scratch. Perhaps the new `pkg_upgrade'
>> could provide versatile options to complete such tasks.
>
> In fact a batch download, followed by batch install is much faster
> than constant interspersing of backup, download, install, etc. like
> portupgrade does. In particular there is only one ftp connection for
> downloading everything which cuts on time, and you can do backups at
> the same time. If you don't beleive me you can try the prototype (in
> python) that i have written a year ago, and which does precisely that:
> http://www.lpthe.jussieu.fr/~talon/pkgupgrade
> (which needs http://www.lpthe.jussieu.fr/~talon/pkg_save.py)
> Most of the time in the script is spent recomputing the INDEX for all
> installed files, because i assumed the INDEX is not necessarily up to
> date.

Except for the package portion, I also wrote a script to update ports[1]
when Perl was still in the base.  The features I really like about it:
1. No dependency on INDEX.  This does make it more expensive to start,
    but the program does cache as much as possible as it runs.  No need
    to perform a duplicate make all-depends-list in a directory if it has
    already been performed.
2. Precalculation of updates before starting.  This allows a lot of
    operations to be performed upfront:  ignore checking, conflict
    checking, prefetching and ports no longer needed by child ports.
3. Crash recovery.  It saves what it has completed along with the build
    tree to a database, so recovery/restarts are quick.
4. Uses portconf for settings and its own rc file to determine what not
    to build.  BTW, I think the +IGNOREME files for portmaster should be
    in /var/db/ports, so they may traverse a manual pkg_delete && make
    install.

Cons:
1. I have not put much time into it lately.
2. Perl is not part of base.
3. Does not respect options set in /var/db/ports.  It solely relies on
    portconf.
4. The tree building code is really convoluted and needs replacement.

Sean
   1. http://www.farley.org/freebsd/#pc
-- 
scf at FreeBSD.org