FreeBSD did it again (still)

[doug]

On Thu, 6 Jul 2017, Matthew Seaman wrote:

> On 2017/07/06 14:46, Warren Block wrote:
>> On Thu, 6 Jul 2017, Baho Utot wrote:
>>
>>> Well FYI the upgrade base 10.1 to 11.0-p10 when as expected. Update
>>> the ports to the current quarterly was a tragic happening.  I have
>>> done this before upgrade a desktop from 10.3 to 11.0-p0 then to
>>> 11.0-p9.  Again the ports just did not work as it resulted in a broken
>>> desktop each time.  I started using the quarterly ports branch
>>> thinking I get some stablilty.  No stability to be found.  Should I
>>> user be able to update without going thru a weeks worth of debugging?
>>> I think that is not too much to ask.
>>
>> It might or might not be obvious, but after going from FreeBSD 10 to 11
>> all ports must be reinstalled.  It is not possible to upgrade only some
>> ports without mysterious breakages.
>
> pkg(8) is actually smart enough to realise that the ABI-version of the
> installed packages doesn't match either the ABI-version of the running
> kernel[*] or the ABI-version of the repository and it /should/ attempt
> to update or reinstall all installed packages to fix that.
>
> Much of the time that will "just work" -- but not always, which is why
> the standard advice is still to delete and reinstall all packages on a
> major version upgrade.  Working out when and why pkg(8) can fail to do
> this correctly and teaching it how to get it right would be a really
> useful contribution.
>
One thing I did not see highlighted in this thread was, it's a laptop. As this 
is the world I live in, I feel the need to say things ain't that bad. Things 
would be much better if more Xorg and www ports developers ran FreeBSD 
workstations. There is a reason that few companies pay anyone to port the wifi 
and graphics drivers to FreeBSD. I am told many of these were likely developed 
on FreeBSD because of superior debugging tools. In the current world things are 
pretty good to great, if you do the following: don't live on the FreeBSD edge 
unless you are willing to and can help find bugs; make sure your graphics card 
is supported before buying (for me wifi would be a plus); and lastly, if you do 
not want to occasionally have to do some serious back-tracking install Xorg, 
Mozilla stuff and your windowing preference (xfce for me) on a 'clean' system.
In that order.

So on 10.3, soon to be 10.4 life is good to great. pkg is a monumental 
improvement and if you are not gaming a $700 laptop will outperform a lot more 
expensive stuff running Mac or Windows. Will a small hicup with firefox I added 
libreoff and gimp to a working system. I did test this path on a laptop that I 
hosed trying to upgrade something in xfce. My experiences; YMMV :)