Help understanding basic FreeBSD concepts (ports, updates, jails)

[andrew clarke]

On Sat 2009-11-07 19:19:52 UTC-0800, Randi Harper (randi at freebsd.org) wrote:

> Don't bother with any of that. Just use portsnap. It's also part of
> base, and was written by the same person that wrote freebsd-update.
> It's lovely and much faster, although some people may argue with me on
> that.

> For your system, use freebsd-update.

Seconded.  Portsnap and freebsd-update are a cinch to use.

> For your ports tree, use portsnap. For installed ports, use
> portupgrade or portmanager. I'm more fond of portmanager, but it seems
> portupgrade has many more users. Both portupgrade and portmanager are
> available in the ports tree, not base.

I use portmaster and find it easy to use.  Not familiar with portmanager.
/usr/ports/UPDATING will often provide portmaster commands where
necessary and these can useful for upgrading some ports.  Maybe it's
easy to translate those commands to their equivalent portmanager commands.

Regards
Andrew