Up grading ports, Xorg et all

[Warren Block]

On Wed, 16 Dec 2009, doug at safeport.com wrote:

> I messed up a KDE 3.5.10 trying to install firefox3 so I thought I 
> would attempt to upgrade using portupgrade and/or portmaster. After a 
> lot of work I think I am back to if you use KDE the only way to 
> upgrade is to start afresh.
>
> At this point I thought I would try Xorg 7.4. I did a "pkg_delete -a" 
> and "pkg_add -r xorg". This was a complete disaster.

How, specifically?

> After trying all the configuration options, tips etc in the handbook, 
> google et all, I decided my 3+ year old thinkpad was just not 
> supported so I composed a "can anyone help me" email to questions. 
> This went off into the ether through user error.
>
> While I was waiting for help I thought I would try installing Xorg from an 
> iso image. The resulting install worked out of the box using the last 
> variation of xorf.conf I had tried. I am left to assume that what I got from 
> pkg_add does not fit together.

The symptoms described in your earlier mail sound like it worked but was 
different from what you expected.

> Obviously my earlier attempts to get an xorg.conf file worked fine. 
> The code did not. As a thought to the Xorg, I do not think the 
> unbundling makes things more stable. Xfree86 was bad enough (so I 
> thought) with its couple of dozen (or so) components. Starting from 
> scratch I now have 204 ports and two versions of python just to run 
> twm. Given that some number of the 204 component are under active 
> development using pkg_add seems out of the question. The second 
> version of python came in because I could not find xdm in the 
> 7.2-release disk1 iso so I did a pkg_add on xdm.

This sounds like you are mixing old and new packages.  portupgrade (and 
probably also portmaster) can use packages for you.

-Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA