Portupgrade on FreeBSD

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."

Comments

I don't mean to be a jerk,

[ignorant_newbie]

but is this a slow news day or something? portupgrade is at least 2 years old... It kicks ass, but it's hardly news (or, imho, as good as portage)

Re:I don't mean to be a jerk,

[kruntiform]

portupgrade is at least 2 years old... It kicks ass, but it's hardly news

portupgrade is not news, but new user documentation is news. Well, if it's good documentation, then it's news. I read a few sections of it just now, and I think it's pretty good. It's written in a direct, readable style and has lots of examples. Since it answered some questions I had about portupgrade, it seems to me to be comprehensive. So, this is pretty cool. One of the best things about BSD is the quality of the documentation.

Re:portupgrade is a port

[Anonymous Coward]

What high-level language is in the base system? Shell script? Forth?

I'd rather have Ruby in the base than Perl, it's a pain to build. Ruby is (currently) much more lightweight, I even have it installed on my Zaurus handheld as a single executable (miniruby).

Wow

[Sevn]

I'm humbled. I used ports forever, even dabbled with portupgrade on FreeBSD and still was of the opinion that Gentoo portage was "better". If anything, I'd say they are neck and neck now. VERY good article. From someone that has to manage a whole bunch of FreeBSD machines, this article hit the spot. Now I'll just add portsdb -Uu and pkgdb -F to my nightly cvsup cron job. If you take the time to set up your cvsup stuff in /etc/defaults/make.conf, updating your sources and ports is as easy as:

cd /usr/src
make update

To translate for Gentoo users:

emerge -upD world becomes:

portversion -L "="

and emerge -uD world becomes:

portupgrade -arR

Oh, and etc-update has always been:

mergemaster

Though mergemaster does kinda suck until you get used to it. Not that etc-update is an e-ticket ride either.

Re:Wow

[Sevn]

I cvsup nightly because it really doesn't matter. That and a lot of these machines are commercial webhosting platforms. One very tiny nightly cvsup is going to take a lot less time than a weekly or monthly update. If it's done nightly, chances are that any security update I hear about from freebsd-security-announce is already there. Also more likely any port with a security problem is upgraded also. That's why I cvsup nightly. I admin 300+ machines that are all facing the world. On each network, I cvsup ONE machine, then push the packages out to the other machines in the farm. In keeping with my "hands off, zero administration" approach, I prefer using cron'd rsync to keep a package directory updated instead of using nfs which is sometimes thought of as an acronym for "NO FUCKING SECURITY". My scripts then install my pre-approved packages from the local package directories on each slave machine. Editing /etc/default/make.conf is of little concern to me because I know the meaning of every single line in the file as I've been using FreeBSD since version 2.1.7. I suppose I could copy it to /etc and only put the differences in there, but it's really not that big of a deal. Rc.conf is something I don't mess with though. I do edit the one in /etc and leave the one in /etc/defaults alone. FreeBSD is kinda how I pay for my car and my house and my food. But hey, thanks for the tips!

Excellent

[thanjee]

Dru Lavigne writes so many really useful articles. Has she got a book on the way?