Re: Portupgrade -af question

On Tue, 26 Oct 2004, Zoltan Frombach wrote:

> Okay guys, this is my very first post to the list, so please be nice to me. 
> ;-)
>
> I have a simple question. I currently have FreeBSD 5.2-CURRENT #3 (from May 
> 9, 2004) installed on a semi-production server. I need to update it to 
> 5.3-RELEASE when it becomes available. I've read in src/UPDATING that all 
> installed ports must be rebuilt (after a successful build world and install 
> world, of course). Someone suggested to use 'portupgrade -af' to rebuild all

Don't forget the mergemaster step!

> installed ports. But this would take a whole day, especially since it's just 
> a single processor Pentium III system. Shouldn't it be faster to let 
> portupgrade use pre-compiled packages (either from a 5.3-RELEASE install CD 
> or from a remote site)? Something like: 'portupgrade -afP' ? Would it work? 
> This would save a lot of time... a lot of down-time, in fact.

This is guaranteed to work if:
- Your ports skeleton is up to date.
- This machine has HTTP and FTP access enabled.
- The ports you are upgrading are not forbidden, deprecated or broken.
- All distfiles are available from at least one of the relevant mirrors.

This is the case because portupgrade -P searches for packages locally or 
wherever PKG_PATH points to, tries to use pkg_fetch and then falls back to 
updating from ports if precompiled packages are not available.

> Can someone more experienced with portupgrade confirm that this would work? I 
> would really appreciate either a firm yes or a firm no answer. I just need to 
> know the answer to this question from someone who is more knowledgable than I 
> am, before I start doing something stupid... ;-) Thank you guys, all!!

"firm yes", but only if all of the above conditions are met.

Have fun with this "upgradathon"! :-)

Regards,
Andy

| Andre Guibert de Bruet | Enterprise Software Consultant >
| Silicon Landmark, LLC. | http://siliconlandmark.com/    >