Problems using portupgrade to recompile all ports

[Scott I. Remick]

On Thu, 15 Jan 2004 17:12:27 +0000, Matthew Seaman wrote:

> Work out what went wrong, fix it and then just run:
> 
>     # portupgrade -af '<2004-01-15'
> 
> which does a forced update of all packages installed before the given
> date.  (Note: -R and -r are unnecessary with -a).  Rinse,
> repeat. Until all your ports are up to date.

Excellent! That should do EXACTLY what I needed. Thank you so much.

> Usually ports problems are either inability to download the required
> distfiles or a temporary SNAFU by the port maintainer/committer.  In
> most cases it suffices to wait a few hours or days, re-cvsup the ports
> tree and start the portupgrade job again.

Yeah that was my plan... I'm well-familiar with ports-tree hiccups. I have
plenty of other things to do to pass the time while I sort this out (like
install 4.9 on a separate drive to try and fix a UFS1 volume I cannot
access due to a bad superblock. Or play with my new Palm Tungsten T3 once
it arrives)

One question: it's not clear from man pkg_glob whether I can combine the
date format '<2004-01-15' with a package name, so that I only update the
dependencies of a SPECIFIC package that are older than that date (using -f
instead of -af of course). Is there a syntax to do that?