Keeping Ports synchronised with Packages

[Richard Bradley]

On Thursday 22 April 2004 2:29 pm, Andrew L. Gould wrote:
> On Thursday 22 April 2004 07:41 am, Richard Bradley wrote:
[...]
> > My problem is that my ports tree is always a couple of minor versions
> > ahead of the available packages.
[...]
> > This means I have a load of libraries that are different versions to
> > those the precompiled packages expect, and some packages even refuse to
> > install.
>
> The way to update your system source and hold back package/port versions is
> to refuse ports.  See:
>
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvsup.html
>
> Alternatively, you can continue to cvsup ports and then upgrade your
> packages to newer versions using the port portupgrade, which can be found
> at /usr/ports/sysutils/portsupgrade.
>
> Best of luck,
>
> Andrew Gould

Perhaps I am confused about the terminology here - by "packages" I mean 
precompiled programs, and by "ports" I mean source code & make files for the 
same programs.

I want to keep my programs up to date, and I want to use precompiled versions 
as much as possible because it can take hours to compile a large program. 
However some programs don't have packages, or the packages won't install 
because I have used the ports system and other, required, programs are out of 
sync.

If I use `portupgrade -PP` (i.e. forcing it to use packages) it (almost) 
always fails because there are never precompiled packages of the same version 
as my (cvsup'ed) ports tree. 

In the same way, `portupgrade -P` (i.e. try to use packages) is equivalent to 
`portupgrade` (i.e. compile from source) because of the version lag in the 
packages as compared to the ports.

One solution might be to get cvsup to check out slightly older versions of the 
port tree that matches up with the available packages. However this doesn't 
seem possible.


Rich