Ports/Packages and release engineering

[jungle Boogie]

Hi John,
On 14 February 2015 at 09:45, John Goerzen <jgoerzen at complete.org> wrote:
> So, it looks to me that ports is essentially always a -CURRENT tree.  I
> don't see any reference in the handbook to selecting different branches
> of ports, or different branches that might happen to match different
> RELEASE versions.  How, then, is quality maintained within the ports?
> Is it just luck of the draw on when a local update happens that it gets
> a version that didn't have a silly bug that got corrected a day later,
> or how do ports get tested before being released to everyone?


That's not my understanding. I think/thought ports will need to
compile on all supported x86, including 8.4. Ports are often updated
but that doesn't mean they don't run on older versions.
You can track ports here: https://www.freshports.org/
It's important to read UPDATING:
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/UPDATING (also at /usr/ports)


Sorry, I don't have enough experience to comfortably answer the other questions.
I will say that I have seen the message reinstall the entire
ports/packages system. I saw that going from 10.0 to 10.1 and I didn't
re-install any ports/packages and had no issues.



> Another small question: I ran something like "pkg install xserver-xorg
> digikam vim screen bash" the other day in my FreeBSD test VM.  I
> discovered quite a bit of information was printed out at the end from
> various packages, which scrolled off the screen.  Is there a way to
> re-display all that information?  It seems if it's important enough to
> display, it's important enough to display long enough to read ;-)


IME, pkg is just telling you what's being installed. In fact, I find
the one-line-per package better than debian's many packages on one
line.


I use tmux so here's my screen install:
pkg install screen
Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue...
FreeBSD repository is up-to-date.
All repositories are up-to-date.
The following 1 packages will be affected (of 0 checked):

New packages to be INSTALLED:
        screen: 4.2.1_5

The process will require 958 KiB more space.

Proceed with this action? [y/N]: y
Checking integrity... done (0 conflicting)
[1/1] Installing screen-4.2.1_5...
[1/1] Extracting screen-4.2.1_5: 100%

If you later want to see versions of packages, you can use `pkg version`

For instance:
tmux-1.9a                          =



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