Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Portupgrade on FreeBSD

Posted by michael on from the up-and-up dept.

BSD Forums writes "In her previous article, OnLamp's Dru Lavigne took a look at the built-in utilities that can be used to manage the FreeBSD ports collection. In this article, she'd like to continue in that vein. She takes a look at portupgrade, a feature-rich port designed to help you get the most out of the ports collection."

7 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No by JDizzy · · Score: 4, Informative

    I admit you have an intersting perspective, and i would point out that you can build your system without kerberos via make.conf options. Same for Sendmail, etc...

    --
    It isn't a lie if you belive it.
  2. Re:portupgrade is a port by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Preferably C++. GNU C++ is bound to be as portable as C, and there shouldn't be any worries about "bloat" as this program isn't meant to be part of the Unix "swiss army knife" of standard utilities. Neither one of those are going anywhere anytime soon. C++ is probably better, maybe even somewhat faster than ruby-based portupgrade. But, yes, unfortunately this isn't even vaporware, it's "I don't have the gumption and talent to do it myself but I'll look a gift horse in the mouth and pretend I know what I'm talking about anyway"-ware.

    While I'm at it, I'm a bit perturbed that devd is written in C++ and doesn't appear to have usbd's capabilities sewn into it yet.

  3. Re:No by cperciva · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yes, you can *rebuild* the system without those; but that's really the point of packagizing code. If sendmail, bind, and other similar software was taken out of base and put into ports, people would be able to add or remove them as distinct packages. Right now, if you've installed a RELEASE and you decide you don't want sendmail around, you need to work out for yourself which files to delete.

    --
    Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
  4. But.... by xA40D · · Score: 4, Informative

    Reasonable article.... But running an automatic portupgrage without paying attention to what's actually being upgraded is a really bad move.

    Upgrading Apache for instance will trash your running config. Whereas MySQL is a bitch to upgrade as by default it will fail if there is an existing DB.

    I find portupgrade -ai is a much better option.

    And a backup of /etc/ and /usr/local/etc would be a good idea first....

    --
    Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
    1. Re:But.... by OpperNerd · · Score: 5, Informative

      I always use the -P option:

      portupgrade -aRrPv

      this does check if there's a package available. Saves a lot of time.

      --
      -- unix is for people without a social life - Patrick van Eijk
    2. Re:But.... by Fudgie · · Score: 2, Informative

      Upgrading Apache will not trash your running config as long as you remove the symlinks to the *-dist directories and make your own dirs. Which is the whole point of having the ports install *-dist files/dirs.

      MySQL upgrades just fine, as there is a flag called SKIP_INSTALL_DB=yes for mysql323-server. Set this in your pkgtools.conf and upgrade all you want.

      mysql40-server and mysql41-server don't require this, as they use a flag to install the db instead.

    3. Re:But.... by Fudgie · · Score: 2, Informative

      .. and how does portupgrade delete a port? By using the ports own 'make deinstall', which leaves your config files in place.

      I just did a portupgrade -f apache, and lookie here:
      -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 37691 Sep 1 20:12 httpd-std.conf
      -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 38645 Jun 23 17:57 httpd.conf
      My config wasn't touched. Maybe it happened earlier, but I've never had a problem the last year or so.