[freebsd-questions] Looking @ upgrades mechanisms...

Javier Vasquez jevv.cr at gmail.com
Mon Dec 1 23:08:05 PST 2008


Hi,

I was reading chapter 4 of the handbook, as well as chapters 24 and
26...  If I got it clear, I pretty much might get the base system
updated by using freebsd-update script.  Ports collection can get
updated with portsnap, but that doesn't update neither the intalled
ports, nor the installed packages.  To upgrade the installed ports,
portmanager or portmaster or portupgrade can be used...  However only
portupgrade can be used to upgrade packages, right?

Now, can something like "portupgrade -a -PP" to upgrade all packages
without building a thing (might be that some don't get updated due to
the lack of binary package yet, and in such case would dependencies be
managed right)?

More into how things work, as ports and pacakages are not part of the
base systems, are they somehow associated to a particular release
(most probably not)?  So that pretty much no matter the release, if
packages and ports are kept up to date, they might be the same for all
releases?

I'm asking these questions since I'm evaluating moving to BSD, but I
want to avoid compiling as much as possible since my box is 800MHz
piii celeron with just 32KB of cache and 512MB of ram, and for it
source based distributions have proven to be too much to handle, so my
intention would be to live with binary packages and updates/upgrades
only...

Also if remaining under -STABLE, is all this possible?  Kind of
understood that openoffice.org can't be installed with "pkg_add -r",
so most probably if living under -STABLE automatic updates for
openoffice.org won't show up...  So this kinds of answers one previous
question about the packages been independent from the base system
release, it looks like they aren't...

Thanks,

-- 
Javier


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