Ports best practice (was Re: Imagemagick port seems broken....)

[Jonathan McKeown]

On Tuesday 13 May 2008 01:04, Johan  Dowdy wrote:
> Just as a best practice you might want to consider running a weekly cvsup
> out of cron.

I'm not sure I'd call this best practice in all cases, having taken over a 
network where every server OS install, and every port, used whatever had been 
the latest and greatest that day (at one stage I think I was running every 
release from 4.8 to 6.0, plus a couple of boxes running given snapshots of 
-STABLE).

I can do without the irritation of having to check, every time I log in to a 
different machine, whether the command I'm about to run or the config file 
I'm about to edit supports the option I'm hoping to use.

I now have most of the servers running the same OS release, and running the 
same version of each port, all installed from a central build server with 
locally-built packages where possible.

When something needs to be upgraded, we follow a documented procedure to make 
sure that there are no problems or regressions and that everything stays more 
or less in step.

Yes, it means our ports tree is often three months or so out of date. You'd be 
surprised how seldom that causes a problem. You'd be astonished how much 
easier it makes my life knowing every setup is the same.

Jonathan