Re: [freebsd-questions] Looking @ upgrades mechanisms...

On Monday 01 December 2008 21:43:08 Javier Vasquez wrote:
On 12/2/08, Javier Vasquez <jevv.cr@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi,

I was reading chapter 4 of the handbook, as well as chapters 24 and
26... If I got it clear, I pretty much might get the base system
updated by using freebsd-update script. Ports collection can get
updated with portsnap, but that doesn't update neither the installed
ports, nor the installed packages. To upgrade the installed ports,
portmanager or portmaster or portupgrade can be used... However only
portupgrade can be used to upgrade packages, right?

Not sure about the others, I use portupgrade myself. But yes, you can update
packages with portupgrade.


Now, can something like "portupgrade -a -PP" to upgrade all packages
without building a thing (might be that some don't get updated due to
the lack of binary package yet, and in such case would dependencies be
managed right)?

Not sure what you mean by managed, but if there's no package there would be no
dependent ports downloaded. If you do a portupgrade -aP (single "P") it will
go look for a package then compile it if it's not available. Compiling really
isn't that bad even on an 800MHz box. I did development for two years on a
750MHz box and don't use packages. FreeBSD does a good job tracking
dependencies, you just have to do some housecleaning once in awhile.
Portupgrade will stop and tell you what to do if if finds something out of
whack in your dependencies. It does that before building anything.


More into how things work, as ports and packages are not part of the
base systems, are they somehow associated to a particular release
(most probably not)? So that pretty much no matter the release, if
packages and ports are kept up to date, they might be the same for all
releases?

There are packages that come with a release, but they are out of date by the
time you load the CD anyway. Ports are always the head branch for all
versions. The packages for a particular branch tend to lag the updates by up
to a couple of weeks although they are built continually. If you want to stay
really up to date you need to keep your tree updated with portsnap or csup
(part of the base system) and compile them yourself. Another advantage to
compiling is you can choose options. The packages are always built with
default options which is generally OK, but not always optimal.


I'm asking these questions since I'm evaluating moving to BSD, but I
want to avoid compiling as much as possible since my box is 800MHz
piii celeron with just 32KB of cache and 512MB of ram, and for it
source based distributions have proven to be too much to handle, so my
intention would be to live with binary packages and updates/upgrades
only...

You can use packages for most ports. There are notable exceptions a port that
is restricted by license from redistribution will never be packaged so you
have no choice but to compile it yourself. But these are few.


Also if remaining under -STABLE, is all this possible? Kind of
understood that openoffice.org can't be installed with "pkg_add -r",
so most probably if living under -STABLE automatic updates for
openoffice.org won't show up... So this kinds of answers one previous
question about the packages been independent from the base system
release, it looks like they aren't...

Can't answer about open office, I don't use it.



Thanks,

--
Javier

YW. Hope I answered some of your questions.

Beech

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