portmaster -a on a live server

[Tim Judd]

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 12:47 PM, Tom Worster <fsb at thefsb.org> wrote:

> though all i really need is mysql/apache/php i have about 100 ports
> installed and portmaster -a takes a long time to complete (hour or two).
>
> so i'm wondering if i ought to be concerned about new binaries being
> installed over the old ones on the disk while the old images are loaded and
> running as daemons.
>
> instead of doing portmaster -a, is there any advantage to:
>
> portmaster -a -x mysql\-server -x apache
> portmaster mysql\-server apache
> reboot
>
> in order to minimize the time that the old servers are running while the
> new
> images are on the disk?
>
> tom
>


Matthew has reported that he's had success with ports automatically
restarting themselves, whereas I've not seen that happen.

I had started (abandoned now) a script that would dynamically ask the rc.d
system if a package was running when it was time to install a new package,
meaning that it needs to stop, install, and start the package during the
upgrade process.  Worked well, until I realized that lots of ports don't do
much (if any) work until make install is called, then it will (of all
things) download and install depenencies and itself.  So while all the
dependencies are being downloaded and installed, the original package that
needed to be upgrade has not been running.  On large upgrades for the sake
of anything better to example, Xorg, KDE/Gnome, MySQL/PostgreSQL all were
NOT running during the 'install' phase which should be quick.  Instead due
to the Makefile writing it was delaying the install and restart of the
packages anywhere from minutes to hours (to days..  OpenOffice).



I abandoned the project mostly because I found little things about the ports
system that is invisible to most people, but when dealing with the ports
system details, they were the sore thumb.

Since then I've found portmanager/portmaster/portupgrade have improved so
now it's time to improve their stuff in terms of patches and upgrades.


YMMV, I just didn't see the success Matthew had.


--Tim