Strange issues while upgrading ports

[Kaya Saman]

On 11/25/2011 04:05 PM, Daniel Nebdal wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Kaya Saman<kayasaman at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On 11/25/2011 03:44 PM, Daniel Nebdal wrote:
>>> On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 2:12 PM, Marco Beishuizen<mbeis at xs4all.nl>    wrote:
>>>> On Fri, 25 Nov 2011, the wise Kaya Saman wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Then ran portupgrade -a
>>>>>
>>>>> for some weird reason the packages listed below didn't get upgraded;
>>>>> upon
>>>>> the error output 'portupgrade' was trying to replace the port with the
>>>>> same
>>>>> version: eg. apache-2.2.13 error came up with the fact that
>>>>> apache-2.2.13
>>>>> was to be installed again but was already installed so I needed to run:
>>>>> make
>>>>> deinstall; make install; make clean in order to re-install
>>>>> apache22......
>>>> Did you csup your portstree first?
>>>>
>>> He used portsnap, which does the same thing.
>>> By the way: "portsnap fetch extract update" is pointless: "extract"
>>> gives you a clean copy of the last fetched version, and  "update"
>>> extracts only what has changed since the last extract or update. Use
>>> "portsnap fetch extract" once, then "portsnap fetch update" from then
>>> on. (Or replace "fetch" with "cron" if you're doing this automatically
>>> - it adds a random delay to not overload the servers at popular times
>>> of the day.)
>>>
>> Thanks for the tip!
>>
>> It's my first time updating/upgrading a FreeBSD system so any 'experienced'
>> advice is always valid and welcome :-)
>>
> Ah, right. :)
> The nice thing with "update" is that it's much faster than "extract" -
> as I'm sure you'll notice.
>
Would you also advise to upgrade my BSD 'release'?

If so I would upgrade to 8.2 as stated in a previous posting but since 
I'm running jails and many services aggregated into one machine, what's 
the best way to proceed?

I'm currently just backing up /etc, /var, /usr/shared, /usr/local/etc, 
/usr/local/var, and /usr/local/shared.

Will the freebsd-upgrade tool wipe all my config files? Or will the 
upgrade be seamless?