Upgrade questions

[Jim Pingle]

Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
>> Have you ever updated your world and kernel?
> 
> Kernel, yes.  I've built and intalled new kernels.  But world?  No.
> Never had the guts to try that.  Much easier just to find a new spare
> drive and download and install the -RELEASE de jure on it.

I should have phrased that a little better, I meant build a new kernel/world 
from updates sources. If you built new kernels from the -RELEASE sources, it 
wouldn't have that much of an impact, but if you update your sources and 
then built only a new kernel, then your world and kernel would be out of 
sync and cause no end of craziness.

You might have better success if you update to a more recent 6.x version 
(6.3-RELEASE or perhaps -STABLE). If you are considering reloading with 7 
anyhow, it might be worth trying it for the experience. It's not nearly as 
difficult as it seems.

>> From the errors you are seeing, it might indicate that a newer version of 
>> the package management tools are in need. At the very least, you can try to 
>> uninstall portupgrade and reinstall it from your new ports tree. I thought 
>> there was a port that would update these (ports-mgmt/pkg_install maybe?) in 
>> older installations.
> 
> OK.  I may try that... *if* I don't first wimp out, and just plop 7.0-RELEASE
> onto a new blank drive first.  (I may end up just doing that for other reasons,
> but I _would_ like to understand ports better.  I just feel like my current
> frustration/education ratio isn't quite where I would have liked it to be for
> this "simple" upgrading task.)

I believe this is the only time in the recent history of the ports system 
that such a major change has taken place. Unfortunately, it has broken quite 
a few systems for various reasons. Some people have pkg_deleted all of their 
ports and reinstalled from scratch out of frustration with the process, or 
like you are considering, starting fresh with a new version after the xorg 
migration.

>>> Help me out a little here.  Educate me.  Please.  Teach a man to fish.  How
>>> does one deal with situations like this, i.e. some package wants Version X
>>> of package P, but what you have installed in version Y, and about eight
>>> zillion things that depend on that (version Y).
>> If you have portupgrade installed, you can force an upgrade or reinstall 
>> like so:
> 
> Yeabut "force upgrade" sounds to me too much like trying to fix a disk
> drive that's making too much noise via juducious use of a hammer.  (I guess
> I'm just old-fashioned that way.)
> 
> Won't a "forced upgrade" effectively break more than it is likely to cure?

That depends on what is wrong in the first place. If the port installation 
is broken in some way, or files are incorrect, then forcing a reinstall of 
the port can fix certain problems. Typically -f is used for reinstalling the 
current version rather than an upgrade, but it has many uses.

>> If you are worried about dependency tracking, pkgdb -L will restore lost 
>> dependencies, but *do* *not* *run* *this* *before* *updating* *xorg* to 7.3. 
>> It will severely mess things up.
> 
> I seem to have already woirked my into into a "severly messed up" state on
> my own volition, so there's probably not much more I could break that I
> haven't already rendered useless anyway.
> (1/2 :-)

Even so, I don't recommend wreaking some major dependency havoc on your 
installed ports unless you want to see how bad you can make it before you 
wipe and reload ;-)

On the system where I did pkgdb -L before updating my xorg ports, it ended 
up with a lot of inconsistent or circular dependencies (I forget why and 
what at the moment, but I had figured it out at the time...) and I ended up 
having to pkg_delete everything xorg-related. Actually, on that system, I 
ended up rebuilding ports with WITHOUT_X11=yes and then I removed X since it 
was rarely used anyhow.

> Yea.  And I like my hair, so that may be the way I go.
> 
> Besides which, as I understand it, 7.x has all sorts of better support for
> multi-threading/SMP... so if I install it, then I can brag to all of my
> friends about how efficient and modern it is at using all of the multiple
> cores that I don't even have yet. :-)

7 seems a lot snappier on my home workstation, and a bit faster on SMP 
servers at work, but I don't personally have any actual data to back that 
up. Overall it has been better than 6, or at least as good, so there was no 
reason to stay with 6 on systems that could handle the time to upgrade. (I 
still have plenty of 6.x machines that are in production, and it will be 
quite some time before they are all moved to 7...)

>> I'm not sure if portsnap supports reverting back to a specific date, but it 
>> might be a good idea to somehow (csup, possibly) revert your ports tree to 
>> shortly after the X.org 7.2 changeover and try to update to that point.
> 
> Why would I want to do that?
> 
> That sounds like a rather odd suggestion.

I mainly suggested that because it would put your system into a state in 
which the xorg upgrade instructions directly applied. If there was a recent 
advancement in the ports system that is incompatible with your base system, 
it would also eliminate that as a potential source of problems.

As others have suggested, including yourself, you might have an inconsistent 
ports tree or package database. It wouldn't hurt anything to rm /usr/ports/ 
and fetch a fresh copy, and you could also rm /var/db/pkg/pkgdb.db and 
rebuild it with pkgdb -u (or pkgdb -fu).

Jim