Upgrading to 7.0 - stupid requirements

[Markiyan Kushnir]

It's amazing -- I also did my recent 6.3->7.0 exactly this way. Running 
it as a desktop, WindowMaker, some of gnu apps. kde is at hand mostly 
for a couple of applications, but it works ok either.

My case is much simpler, but I feel that it's worth of considering 
alternatives to portupgrade. I learned much from using portupgrade.

Thanks,
Markiyan


Oliver Fromme wrote:
> Hello Marko,
> 
> I'm very sorry that you have trouble updating your FreeBSD
> installation, but there are very good technical reasons to
> update your packages, as others have already explained in
> detail (i.e. library conflicts).
> 
> When I updated my home workstation from FreeBSD 6 to 7,
> I used the opportunity to clean up my installed packages,
> which was long overdue anyway.
> 
> First I saved the output from "pkg_info" in a file.  Then
> I edited it and removed everything that I don't need.
> There was lots of superfluous crap in it, like ports that
> I installed once out of curiosity but never continued to
> use them, and ports that were installed as a dependency
> once but aren't required anymore because the dependent
> software is long gone.
> 
> Then I did "pkg_delete \*", checked for left-overs in
> /usr/local because not everything was removed cleanly,
> and then installed the ports from my text file again.
> I chose to compile from ports instead of installing
> precompiled packages because the machine is fairly fast
> (if you have a slow machine, installing packages will
> be much faster, of course).
> 
> It certainly went a lot quicker than if I had blindly
> updated all ports without cleaning up.  And now all of
> my installed packages are guaranteed to be fresh and
> up to date, and I only have the stuff on my harddisk
> that I really need.
> 
> Really, such situations where you should update all of
> your packages is the best opportunity to clean up the
> mess that has accumulated on your disk in a long time.
> I recommend that everyone considers doing that, too,
> instead of blindly running portupgrade.  Of course,
> the latter would work, too, but it takes longer and
> will rather add to the mess instead of cleaning it. ;-)
> 
> Best regards
>    Oliver
>