portupgrade failure

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 02:08:54PM -0400, Michael P. Soulier wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 2:05 PM, Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu at freebsd.org> wrote:
> > So don't use it?  :-)  There are alternatives like portmaster.
> 
> I suppose I prefer a single, reliable, supported tool for the system.
> portupgrade seems to be pushed the most in all of the documentation

Yes, and I've always considered that a big disappointment, since
portupgrade is written in Ruby (thus requiring knowledge of a separate
language rather than C), and has its own dependency database (due to
supposed limits of the standard /var/db/pkg database).

When portupgrade breaks -- and believe it, it happens quite often, as a
brief review of the freebsd-ports mailing list will show you -- it's a
nightmare.  I have to ask you: is this really worth it to you?

You could use portmaster, which is a /bin/sh script that does not behave
this way, and is maintained by a member of the FreeBSD developer
community (Doug Barton).  This would be a "single reliable tool" that
does not rely on external dependencies.  I strongly urge you to consider
it.  Do I use it?  No, because I'm one of those "I do everything by
hand" administrators who does things like rm -fr /usr/local ; pkg_delete
-af and so on.  But if I wanted a tool that managed things for me, I
would very likely go with portmaster.

Please note that I often get flamed for flaming portupgrade, and I would
not be surprised if that occurred as a result of this mail either.  I
strongly advocate using whatever tool gets the job done (and if that's
portupgrade, great!), but I see way too many portupgrade-related support
posts on the freebsd-ports mailing list for me to ever consider it.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |