7.2-STABLE to 8-R

[Roland Smith]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 09:49:32AM +0000, John wrote:
> 
> Looks like I had to learn the hard way. portmanager won't fix it all.

Been there, done that. :-) 

I think this problem is just too complex when updating between major versions,
for several reasons. First of all being that the port management tool probably
do not know they are updating to a new major version of the system
libraries. Sometimes a port will not build correctly when an older version is
installed. And there can be special instructions in /usr/ports/UPDATING that
the upgrade tools can't read.

IMO building a tool that can rebuild ports between major versions would
be nice but not worth the effort, since it happens so infrequently.

> Basically had to make delete old libs and files as per the Makefile in
> /usr/src, then did pkg_delete -a then rm -rf /usr/ports then portsnap,
> then installed what ports I needed starting off with the monsters like
> the latest perl and xorg.

It seems to me that deleting the entire ports tree is not necessary. That
would delete all the distfiles as well. Next time just update it with
portsnap, it will save you a lot of downloading.

And if you have a spare machine, update that first and then copy /usr/local,
/var/db/ports and /var/db/pkg to the other machines with the same hardware
architecture. That will save you a lot of time and effort and will result in
minimal downtime and risk.

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