portupgrade vs. portmanager

Jay O'Brien jayobrien at att.net
Fri Dec 24 09:02:40 PST 2004


RW wrote:

> On Friday 24 December 2004 07:38, Michael C. Shultz wrote:
> 
>>On Thursday 23 December 2004 11:16 pm, Jay O'Brien wrote:
>>
>>>Michael C. Shultz wrote:
>>>
>>>>On Thursday 23 December 2004 10:01 pm, Jay O'Brien wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>I'm running 5.3 RELEASE and trying to learn. I did a ports cvsup.
>>>>>Following the Dru Lavigne article on portupgrade at
>>>>>http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/08/28/FreeBSD_Basics.html?page
>>>>>=1 I installed portupgrade and then ran portsdb -Uu. It errored
>>>>>out, telling me that I shouldn't use my "refuse" file that stopped
>>>>>the non- english docs and ports from being loaded on my HD.
>>>>>
>>>>>In trying to understand this issue, I found portmanager, and it
>>>>>looks like it would perform the same function as portupgrade.
>>>>>
>>>>>My questions: Is there a way around the "refuse" file prohibition,
>>>>>perhaps with portmanager? Does portmanager replace portupgrade?
>>>>
>>>>portmanager doesn't require the INDEX files to keep ports up to
>>>>date, so the refuse file is a non issue with it.
>>>>
>>>>-Mike
>>>
>>>Sounds good. What's the downside, if any, to using portmanager
>>>instead of portupgrade?
>>
>>All of your ports will be built with the correct dependencies, they will
>>work better leaving you less to complain about in the mail lists and so
>>you will become bored.  Because everything is working exactly as it
>>should you may begin to think you are a Maytag repair man, nothing much
>>to do, just always setting around waiting for something to break.....
> 
> 
> I don't use portmanager myself, but isn't it the case that portmanager 
> rebuilds not just ports that have newer versions in the ports tree, but also 
> all ports that recursively depend on those ports.  
> 
> I just updated kdehier with portupgrade in about a minute. The whole of KDE 
> depends on kdehier, so presumably portmanager would have taken several days, 
> and kdehier isn't particularly unusual. I would see that as a major downside.
> 
> When it's necessary UPDATING will suggest running portupgrade  -rf to force 
> rebuilding. That kind of UPDATING entry is in a small minority, which 
> suggests to me that most of the problems with ports don't stem from the 
> sequence of their updating, so I can't see how portmanager is any kind of 
> magic-bullet. 
> 
>  
So portmanager rebuilds whether it needs it or not, and portupgrade 
only rebuilds when there is a later distribution of the software? The 
distinction between the two is not clear to me. 

This is my first try to update ports, and I want to set up a procedure 
for updating that I can follow in the future.

Jay



More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list