portsdb and cvsup

[Rakhesh Sasidharan]

On Sun, 5 Aug 2007, Arend P. van der Veen wrote:

> The approach that I had been using was:
>
> /usr/local/bin/cvsup  -L 0 /usr/sup/supfile
> /usr/local/sbin/portsdb -Uu
>
> This had worked great until the emacs22 update.  Now portsdb crashes due to 
> the emacs entry in /etc/make.conf.  However, I see very little chatter on the 
> lists about this.  I have started to wonder if the bulk of the community may 
> be updating their ports differently.  Upon some limited research I found that 
> I could use:
>
> /usr/local/bin/cvsup  -L 0 /usr/sup/supfile
> /usr/local/sbin/portsdb -Fu
>
> This work fine for me.  I can then use tools such as pkg_version, pkg_delete, 
> portinstall and portupgrade without any problems.
>
> My open ended question is what does the rest of the community do to update 
> their ports collection?
>

I don't run portsdb at all. :)

What I figured from the portsdb manpages is that if you don't run it 
manually then it gets run upon using one of the portupgrade tools. I don't 
mind the 30s or so delay that causes and so I don't run portsdb manually.

During my first few days with FreeBSD, however, I used to run ''portsdb 
-Fu''. My understanding is that that would fetch the INDEX-6 and update 
INDEX-6.db (since I am on FreeBSD 6.x) but I don't see why I should do 
this coz the INDEX files are updated when I update the ports tree anyways! 
(If I have understood this incorrectly, someone please correct me).

I tried ''portsdb -Uu'' just once. To see what it does. Took a long time 
and so I never tried it again. From the manpage I understand that it 
creates/ updates the INDEX files by running the ''make index'' command, 
but the reasoning behind that didn't make sense to me ...

So that's my story.

Regards,
Rakhesh