Performing installed ports upgrade / leaving some software intact

Roland Smith rsmith at xs4all.nl
Wed Jan 14 11:18:41 PST 2009


On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 07:03:02PM +0100, Zbigniew Szalbot wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> I am now full into planning the 7.0-RELEASE to 7.1-RELEASE upgrade. I
> know that at the end of the day it will also mean upgrading all ports
> (portupgrade -af). 

Not necessarily. Upgrading all ports is only mandatory after a major
version update, e.g. from 6.x to 7.x because of changed shared library
versions. A point release should not affect shared library versions.

Personally, I like to keep the ports on my desktop updated every other
week or so, depending on if I see something interesting on freshports...

> I have one port - mailman - which I have customized
> a lot and do not really want to upgrade it as it will most likely mean
> I will have to hack a few files again.
> 
> What options do I have so that I do not break the setup?
>
> I am thinking of:
> 
> 1/ backing up the hacked files and restoring them later (but I will
> overwrite the newer files with older ones perhaps breaking something).

You should merge any differences by hand instead of overwriting
them. 'diff -u' is your friend there.

> 2/ making them read only (but the end result will be the same and
> upgrading as root I will overwrite them anyway).

'chflags schg,sunlnk <files>' (as root) will do the trick. Even root
cannot overwrite these without removing the flags.
 
> And that would be it. My wisdom ends here. Is there any option to
> survive the ports upgrade? :)

Touch /var/db/pkg/mailman/+IGNOREME. This should make both portmaster
and portupgrade leave this port alone.

> If not, I guess I will just have to hack Mailman files again after the
> upgrade...

Or see if you can get your changes comitted upstream. Maybe as OPTIONS? 

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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