Portupgrade Package Question

[Polytropon]

On Sat, 09 Jul 2011 12:32:12 -0700, Thomas D. Dean wrote:
> On Sat, 2011-07-09 at 12:05 -0700, Thomas D. Dean wrote:
> 
> Sorry to answer my own post.
> 
> The packages that are out-of-date on the system I was updating are in
> relationship to 8.2-release.
> 
> A couple days ago, I cvsup'd the port tree with
> *default release-cvs tag=.
> ports-all
> 
> Today,
> portsnap fetch extract 
> ...
> portsnap fetch update
> ...
> portupgrade -PPRva
> 
> Does the portsnap update the port tree relative to 8.2-release or
> 8-stable?  Or, did cvsup get ports from 8-stable?
> 
> Looks like 8-stable.
> 
> 8-stable    m4-1.4.16,1.tbz
> 8.2-release m4-1.4.15,1.tbz
> 
> Anyway, I can get there from here

If I understood everything correctly, CVS (csup) and portsnap
do both follow "the one tree" which gets frequently updated,
and by the tag specified above you'll always get the current
version of the tree. Getting older versions (e. g. the RELEASE
tree) involves specifying a different tag, or loading it from
the installation media directly.

The difference is that changes in the ports tree are reflected
much faster in the CVS method than in the portsnap approach,
which may "lag" a bit. However, portsnap seems to work faster
and to perform better than CVS. It's also worth mentioning that
it seems to fit better to the "building cycle" of the -stable
ports to become precompiled packages (that you request using
the -PP parameter, similar to the use of pkg_add -r in case of
installation instead of update).

But if you require the most recent ports tree, using CVS seems
to be the better method. As you're updating binary, but with
using the ports tree (portupgrade relies on that, pkg_add for
example doesn't), you should make sure to always have the
current version if you follow the stable OS branch.




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...