Upgrading packages - portupgrade confusion

[Kaya Saman]

Hi Jerry and Michael,

thanks for all the advise and information!!

I think I was confusing terminologies a little....

I was trying to imply that I have been building from ports all this time 
and *not* using pkg_add to obtain pre-built packages. I think mainly 
it's just that I've been using package managers too much with Linux and 
OpenSolaris distros that it got burned into my brain..... not to mention 
that yesterday was a 14 hour shift without break which didn't help.

The thing I don't quite understand though is that if the ports tree
>  gets refreshed, do the packages get upgraded or will I need to
>  rebuild them??

You have to rebuild them.


Does this apply to ports too??


"portupgrade -a" or "portmanager -u" depending on what application you
are using. Switching between multiple port maintenance applications is
not the worse thing you could do; however, I would not recommend it as
an everyday occurrence.


Ok so "portupgrade -a" upgrades all ports according to the manual.


On 09/12/2010 03:52 PM, Michael Powell wrote:
> [...]
> To elaborate a little. csup -L 2 ports is what refreshes the ports tree.
> Portupgrade is a third party app you can install to assist in automating the
> updating process. Once you've installed portupgrade there are man pages for
> portsdb, pkgdb, and portversion to see what the switches described above do.
> The commands above are just strung together to prepare a system for
> updating. portupgrade -a is actually what does the actual updating.
>
> There are other tools as well, I'm just not as familiar with them. I think
> the other one is called portmaster. It may even be better, I don't know as I
> tend to stick with what I know as long as it keeps doing the job.
>
> [
Ok, so if I understand correctly now is that the csup command refreshes 
the ports tree while portupgrade upgrades the actual port itself....

eg:

cd /usr/ports/*/nano
make install clean

although not the case but say if this was to build version 1.8 of the 
Nano text editor, running:

csup -L 2
portupgrade nano

would upgrade the installed version to 1.9??

Of course the current version of Nano is totally different I am just 
trying to understand here!!

> [...]
> I don't know if I can properly explain well enough, but I'll take a stab at
> it anyways. But I believe the first answer here would be no. Refreshing the
> ports tree does not install or update any installed software.
>
> I kind of keyed in on your mentioning of portupgrade. Portupgrade is a tool
> for automating the upgrading of installed software. While I believe it, and
> possibly portmaster can operate on pre-built packages I myself stopped using
> packages a long time ago. I compile everything.
>
>    
Ok I think this practically explains what I've just been trying to say 
above.
>
> [...]
> Hope this helps. I'm not the best at explaining things, but the Handbook is
> a most excellent resource to be studied extensively. It is written much
> better than anything I can manage. And while much of it may seem cryptic at
> first glance, most of what you need to know is in there.
>
>    
Yep I think this helps a lot!!! :-)

> -Mike
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>    

Many thanks and best regards,


Kaya