Status of portupgrade and portmaster?

[Vlad K.]

On 2017-10-02 12:05, Marco Beishuizen wrote:
> 
> I agree, imho poudriere is designed to maintain ports and testing
> them, or if you have to build ports for lots of systems. And it works
> very well for that too. But portupgrade and portmaster are imho far
> better in just tracking newer versions of installed ports. I'm also
> not sure if poudriere is able to track ports on a STABLE system (as in
> my case).

It may've been the original design idea, but Poudriere is the de facto 
pkg building tool on FreeBSD for the official pkg repository, so its 
application is far from just testing.

Also, Poudriere is building a repository, comparing it to any other tool 
for tracking _installed_ ports is simply wrong, pkg does that. Even with 
portmaster, pkg does that as portmaster builds a pkg and registers it 
with the pkg database.

It will perfectly detect changes and upgrade newer versions of packages 
for the repos it is maintaining, and `pkg upgrade` will handle the 
tracking of installed packages.

There is also huge advantage in building a repo FIRST, then using pkg 
LATER. I've had a ton of issues upgrading ports that were in use, where 
a dependency would be upgraded first and the program in use would fail 
because its port is not yet updated for that change.

So if we want to compare apples to apples, then the difference is 
between "simple" tools that directly manage files on the system, versus 
tools that prepare a pkg repo first, and you manage the files on the 
system with pkg (some-tool build-and-install    vs    some-tool build && 
pkg install). It may be someone's PREFERENCE to do the former, but there 
is no objective benefit of that over preparing pkgs first, in an 
(automatically managed) isolated environment.

That said, Poudriere is perfectly capable to manage software on a single 
machine. It works out of the box with a few simple steps needed to set 
it up for that task (poudriere jail + poudriere ports).


-- 
Vlad K.