portupgrade vs. portmanager

[Michael C. Shultz]

On Saturday 25 December 2004 04:53 am, Peter Schuller wrote:
> > Right now portmanager is upgrading kdelibs and I'm still using it.
> > The only problem that might occur is between the
> > deinstall/reinstall steps I'll be missing the libraries for about a
> > minute, when this happens I just wait untill its finished
> > reinstalling then continue.
> > Here is a recap of what happens:
>
> ...
>
> > I've been testing this for a year now and haven't had a problem yet
> > using a program while it is being updated.
>
> That does indeed sound perfectly painless. I failed to remember that
> there is another factor playing into my annoyance with pkg_chk -
> namely that it seems to remove dependent packages in chunks prior to
> re-installing them. So the end-result is that the system is
> completely missing several packages for extended periods of time
> while a bunch of other packages are being compiled.
>
> I don't know why this is done or exactly under what circumstances.
> But indeed, the way portmanager behaves as you described above sounds
> a lot better.
>
> > Portupgrade has one serious flaw in my opinion and that is running
> > something like pkgdb -F damages the port installation database as
> > far as I'm concerned.  It causes the data base to say ports were
> > built with dependency ports that they were  never really built
> > with.  Portmanager only addresses that one issue and for the
> > forseeable future that is where all the focus will be, only on
> > correctly updating ports.
>
> Ok. That sounds good. To be honest I have never understood why the
> dependencies seem to randombly break, requiring a lot of fiddling
> with pkgdb.

>
> I tried portmanager in the past but missed the fact of 'proper'
> upgrading of entire dependency chains. I will have another go now
> though. Thanks for the clarifications!

Thanks for giving portmanager a try! Right now it is having a problem
with conflicting ports (like some of the linux base ports) where 
portupgrade can alter the dependencies portmanager gets a little 
confused so you have to resolve the conflicts manually.  That should be 
resolved in portmanager ver 0.2.2.

-Mike

manually if they occur.