Upgrade suggestion

[Gary Kline]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2007 at 05:58:28PM -0700, youshi10 at u.washington.edu wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Mar 2007, illoai at gmail.com wrote:
> 
> >On 26/03/07, Chuck Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> wrote:
> >>On Mar 26, 2007, at 4:40 PM, Gary Kline wrote:
> >>>
> >>>       Hi Folks,
> >>>
> >>>       Last night it struck me that one reason I constantly find new
> >>>       ports to upgrade is that with ~17K ports, if you're running one
> >>>       of the more common desktop managers and several popular apps,
> >>>       there are going to be at least a dozen minor tweaks every day.
> >>
> >>Possibly, for a very busy program with multiple authors actively
> >>making changes.  Normally, projects accumulate such changes and only
> >>release point version updates perhaps every month or so, and most
> >>have updates available much less often than that.
> >>
> >>>       E.g.:going from foo-1.6.7_2  to foo-1.6.7_3.
> >>
> >>Portrevision bumps commonly happen when an underlying dependency
> >>changes; you generally don't get any changes to foo itself, unless
> >>the program version itself changes.
> >>
> >>>         I used to run
> >>>       port[upgrade|manager] twice/week.  Was swamped; recently,
> >>>       upgrading things daily.   Since a lot of the wm ports take
> >>>       > 24 hours to build/re-build, I'm pretty much wedged.   Thus
> >>>       this suggestion  (for all port/package upgrade suites):
> >>>       have a flag, say 'u' for "urgent" when *foo*" goes from
> >>>       foo-1.6.7 to -1.6.8  or else when/if foo makes a critical
> >>>       fix.
> >>
> >>There's an easier way: you can probably wait to rebuild ports until
> >>you see something listed in portaudit's output, or you know you want
> >>to update something being actively used to a specific known version
> >>that you need.
> >>
> >
> >Of course, Gentoo's portage system does all of this.
> >Of course, Gentoo's portage system is a complete
> >labyrinth of configuration files scattered over countless
> >myriads (10^4) of subdirectories so that running a mixture
> >of Holy-and-Blessed Versions and "testing" versions
> >becomes a lovely game of tag combined with memory and
> >$10,000 Pyramid, only fewer bleached-white teeth.


	I've run several distros of Linux.  Ubuntu is (or *was*) my
	favorite; they're getting carried away.  ....(IMHO).

> >
> >I think the addition of portaudit for such a huge (~17K ports!)
> >collection (and a much less strenuous upgrade cycle) is an
> >excellent idea.
> >
> >-- 
> >--
> 
> Gentoo is a pain, but it's the only thing I can really run ("stable"-y) on 
> my Core 2 Duo box right now (desktop). Not ready to go straight to -CURRENT 
> on a desktop, quite yet.. I'll give it 6.2-RELEASE shot in a week.
> 
> But anyhow, I do really like ports more, for all of its quirks.. it truly 
> is a better (simpler) system to deal with, and as long as some of the stuff 
> under the hood gets fixed soon, the better.


	For tuning things to your server, compiler, just the way you want
	it, yes.  I'm still building tests for g**-4.2, and will post
	something when I have anything solid.


> 
> Oh, but you shouldn't really have to worry about upgrading stuff all the 
> time Gary. There's no point in upgrading packages daily -- I used to do 
> that in Gentoo and all it did was waste precious CPU cycles and reduce the 
> life of my hard disk.
> 
> Upgrades once to twice a week do just fine for many systems (unless you're 
> purposely running LINT for the entire ports collection -- which doesn't 
> exist quite yet :)..).


	Lint?!!  Good grief, I haven't touched that for years.  My
	trying-to-keep-current started when I had 6.2 firmly on my backup
	DNS server.  I figured it would be trivial to have _everything_
	current ... and ran smack into the consequences of complexity
	theory.  I'll chill out and use portaudit!  thanks, guys,

	gary


> 
> -Garrett
> 
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"

-- 
  Gary Kline  kline at thought.org   www.thought.org  Public Service Unix