portupgrade vs. portmanager

[Michael C. Shultz]

On Tuesday 28 December 2004 10:03 am, you wrote:
> Does portmanager handle packages? If not any plans to do so?  I would
> be happy to help with testing.

portmanager only handles packages in that it builds back up packages of
each port it updates, these packages are correctly build for your 
specific system.  The problem with packages that you down load is
they have to be built for the lowest common denominator, ie. lowest
cpu that most are likely to have (486?, 586?), no options, etc, and they 
are usually built with out of date dependencies.

As a test, install a package not allready on your system with a lot of 
dependencies like misc/sword for example then run portmanager.

You'll see portmanager find everything about that package that is wrong 
for your system and then correct it, and it will also end up rebuilding 
misc/sword and making a new package of it.  That new package will be 
built correctly for your system.

After you are familiar with how portmanager works and if you still
want to help with testing then yes I am very interested, please let me
know.

-Mike


>
> On Sat, 25 Dec 2004, Michael C. Shultz wrote:
> > > > 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.