Upgrading perl

[Lowell Gilbert]

Jack Stone <jacks at sage-american.com> writes:

> uname -a FreeBSD mail.sagedata.net 7.0-RELEASE-p9 FreeBSD
> 7.0-RELEASE-p9 #2: Sun Jan 18 19:59:27 CST 2009
>
> Running perl5.10 (yeah, old!)
> This is a production server.
>
>
> Been playing catchup on ports including perl as UPDATING recommends:
> portupgrade -o lang/perl5.12 -f perl-5.10.\*
>
> That has worked on other servers, but not this one. Anyone know what I
> need to do to clean this up??
>
> But, can't get past this fatal error:
> mail# portupgrade -o lang/perl5.12 -f perl-5.10.\*
> "/usr/ports/Mk/bsd.options.mk", line 231: Error in archive
> specification: "WITHOUT_"
> "/usr/ports/Mk/bsd.options.mk", line 231: Error in archive
> specification: "WITHOUT_"
> make: fatal errors encountered -- cannot continue
> ** Makefile possibly broken: lang/perl5.12:

You're almost four years past the end-of-life on the release you're
running, so it's been left behind in terms of support. In this case it
looks (based on a *very* quick look) that you may be running into
changes in how make(1) actually works, in which case backporting the
ports functionality will be more work than it's worth.

If the machine "can't" be updated, and assuming it's secure (which hard
to be sure about with old software on the Internet), you may be best off
leaving it alone.

Good luck.