Avoiding upgrade to xorg 7.2

[Bram Moolenaar]

Nikola Lecic wrote:

> On Thu, 14 Jun 2007 11:42:45 +0200
> Bram Moolenaar <Bram at moolenaar.net> wrote:
> 
> > Glad to hear you have good experiences with the port system.  I do
> > wonder how much downtime you have while updating the ports.
> 
> Well, I normally don't have downtime at all. I update ports tree once in
> 1-3 days, which means I have ~10-20 ports to compile (desktop machine,
> ~850 ports installed). I just have to be a bit careful since this
> machine is pretty slow, so I don't miss to 'portversion -v -L =' and
> then:
> 
>   * I care not to compile openoffice, gimp, etc, use packages then
>   * I use to do 'portupgrade -a' overnight (and that's enough)
>   * sometimes I find useful to do partial upgrade without stopping any
>     running application or my work during daytime (in most cases
>     complete upgrade can be done even without turning X off -- but
>     examine portversion listing to be sure)
>   * if I'm out of home for a week and have to do bigger update, I use
>     '-aP', except for several applications with custom options.
> 
> That's a routine, like morning coffee, takes <0.5% of time, and _never_
> failed.
> 
> The most important, I'm speaking about my primary everyday desktop
> machine I completely depend on and do all my work on it.

Amazing.  My experiences are quite different.  But then, I do need
openoffice, which takes about a whole day to build (and runs out of
diskspace if I forget to clean up first).  This failed three times
(files could not be downloaded) before it worked, so it took me five
days to build openoffice last time.

> > I'm afraid my experiences are not so good.  Many times I got stuck
> > halfway a port upgrade and somehow had to manually fix things.  I
> > can't risk breaking my machine to a level where X11 won't start.  So
> > I'm very careful with updating ports.  And I can't wait for a couple
> > of days for builds to finish (not to mention that there is very often
> > something wrong, such as running out of disk space, a file that can't
> > be downloaded, etc.).
> 
> I don't experience such things because my ports tree is always
> up-to-date. But it is normal if you mix old and new packages, of
> course.

I don't intentionally mix old and new packages.  But I sometimes get
stuck with something that can't be uninstalled and have to forcefully
install another version without deinstalling the old one.  That's bad
of course, but sometimes there is no reasonable alternative.

Note that this is a development system, I sometimes need to install
specific versions of autoconf, gtk, motif, etc.  And have programs
compiled outside of the ports tree with them, thus can't delete some
ports without breaking these programs.  It does mostly work OK, the
ports system is often paranoid about installing two versions of the
same port.

> I've never experienced such stability (and possibilities) on Linux
> desktop machines (speaking from a very long experience).

On Linux you can at least often install binary packages.  I gave up on
that for FreeBSD some time ago, it caused more problems than building
from source (esp. that specific versions of packages were missing and
building them from source then doesn't work either).  Building from
source works better, but is more than 10 times slower.

One thing that amazes me: "make distclean" in /usr/ports is extremely
slow, since it uses the dependencies and most ports get cleaned dozens
of times.  Still need to do that, especially before building openoffice.

> As of big Xorg upgrade, use '-aP'; it will not take that long. Or even
> better, since you probably has a mess of old and new ports, deinstall
> everything and start anew with a fresh ports tree (again, don't compile
> if a package exists).

"deinstall everything" is not an option, it means I can't work for a
couple of days.  And will mean quite a few things I build outside the
ports tree will stop working.

-- 
hundred-and-one symptoms of being an internet addict:
250. You've given up the search for the "perfect woman" and instead,
     sit in front of the PC until you're just too tired to care.

 /// Bram Moolenaar -- Bram at Moolenaar.net -- http://www.Moolenaar.net   \\\
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