Ports vs. Packages

Mark Woodson mwoodson at sricrm.com
Mon Aug 18 16:48:44 PDT 2003


On Monday 18 August 2003 04:25 pm, Charles Howse wrote:
> > Neither. I'd recommend installing sysutils/portupgrade and using the
> > portinstall option to fetch & install packages (so you always get the
> > latest version). Check the -P and -PP options to portinstall.
> >
> > Note that doing this will require you to have an updated ports tree.
> > You'll need to cvsup your ports regularly
> > (net/cvsup-without-gui). There
> > are many threads on the mailing lists with detailed information on how
> > to cvsup your ports tree and rebuild your INDEX.
>
> Will doing it that way require all the compiling?

Not necessarily.  If you run portupgrade with "-P" it will attempt to use 
packages wherever it can find them, and install from ports where it cannot 
find a package.  "-PP" will _only_ use packages, however it will then fail if 
it cannot find a package and you would then need to fetch the package 
yourself manually.  The way it sounds like you would be using it you'd want 
to use "-P", but I'd recommend reading the man page for portupgrade.

Packages are nice for the speed you can install them with, but can be much 
harder to deal with the dependencies unless you use something like 
portupgrade (which is much more useful after you've got what you want 
installed and want to keep it all up to date).

-Mark



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