freebsd-stable packages on freebsd-release-4.9

[Kent Stewart]

On Tuesday 04 May 2004 11:26 am, Clay Holladay wrote:
> I upgraded my ports tree with cvsup using "." for the release so I
> would get the latest ports.  pkg_add -r downloads packages from
> freebsd-release-4.9 and portupgrade -aPPR fails because it tries to
> download packages with version numbers matching the ports tree from
> the freebsd-release-4.9 directory.  Compiling from ports give up to
> date software.  I know that ports only supports freebsd-stable and
> freebsd- current, so is this what should be happening?  Or should
> pkg_add -r be in synch with ports.  Is it possible to use freebsd
> stable packages on freebsd-4.9, or do I need to always compile from
> ports?

You might do a "man pkg_add" and pay attention to the environmental 
variable PACKAGESITE. Yours is pointing to the freebsd-4.9 packages 
Building all of the packages is an enormous task and some mirrors stay 
closer than others. I use snapshots.jp.freebsd.org for somethings but 
my ports were updated more recently that snapshots were. I have an 
AMD-2400+ that is mostly used as a test machine and will rebuild them 
when I think it is time. Updating the 303 ports that I have installed 
required just over 12 hours of cpu time.

If you have a computer that is faster than 2GHz, you can probably build 
from ports better than you can find a mirror to download from. When 
they upgraded KDE to version 3.2.1, I set PACKAGESITE to point to 
FruitSalad, the home of kde FreeBSD, and did a package update using the 
-P option. The update using portupgrade -puf was only 20% slower than 
the system using FruitSalad. A 3GHz machine would eliminate the 
difference. The download speed from FruitSalad varied all of the way 
from 8KB/s to 40+KB/s. I don't know what I would see on a really good 
connection with no interference.

Kent

-- 
Kent Stewart
Richland, WA

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