port upgrades

[Kent Stewart]

On Monday 07 June 2004 02:01 pm, Daniela wrote:
> On Monday 07 June 2004 19:35, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> > On Mon, Jun 07, 2004 at 07:14:34PM +0000, Daniela wrote:
> > > On Monday 07 June 2004 17:28, Tim Traver wrote:
> > > >    Hi all,
> > > >    Is there a way to do a quick update of a particular port
> > > > directory ??? I don't necessarily want to do the portupgrade,
> > > > but just get the latest port files for a particular port.
> > > >    Right now, if i want to make sure the ports are up to date,
> > > > I have to use sysinstall to download the entire port
> > > > collection, which takes forever...
> > > >    Am I missing a quick utility to just check and make sure I
> > > > have the latest port files for one at a time ?
> > >
> > > You could use CVSup to update just the directories you want, and
> > > you can also put this into the system crontab to periodically run
> > > it. That's pretty convenient.
> >
> > You _will_ run into problems if you only update parts of the ports
> > collection.
>
> Well, I didn't mean upgrading of just one or two directories, but
> rather skipping directories such as the japanese ports if you don't
> speak japanese. Almost no ports depend on things in language-specific
> directories (at least not the ones I have installed).
>

Well, there are side effects that you may not know or think about. For 
example, many of the ports include pieces from other pieces. If you 
don't upgrade everything, you could be using old information. Make is 
very particular and the only safe way to refuse, is to delete the 
refused tree, and then modify /usr/ports/Makefile to ignore those 
pieces. If you follow those steps and something breaks during the make 
index process, there is a lot that you don't understand about make and 
will learn soon :). 

FWIW, you don't save a lot of disk space by cvsuping ports-all and you 
may save yourself a lot of problems you wouldn't think about.

Kent

-- 
Kent Stewart
Richland, WA

http://users.owt.com/kstewart/index.html