portupgrade: the -P options rarely works

[RW]

On Sun, 20 Jan 2008 09:49:29 +0100
Giorgio Valoti <giorgio_v at mac.com> wrote:

> 
> On 20/gen/08, at 01:22, RW wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 19 Jan 2008 23:35:42 +0100
> > Giorgio Valoti <giorgio_v at mac.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Hi all,
> >> I’ve noticed that using the -P option with portupgrade, which
> >> should try to fetch the binary version of a package rarely works.
> >> Most of the times it tries to fetch the package from the freebsd
> >> site, it fails and then proceed to build it from the sources.
> >> While I can expect from to time that a pre-compiled version of a
> >> package to be unavailable, it surprises me to see this so many
> >> times.
> >
> > Are you aware that you need to pick-up stable packages, rather than
> > release packages, for portupgrade -P to work properly?
> 
> Well, no. What is the way to distinguish between stable and release?

Packages are built per branch, but packages for release security
branches are not generally updated. So if someone is using, say, 6.2 and
wants updated packages, they set the PACKAGESITE variable to fetch
6-Stable packages instead. Try googling for the correct setting.