Re: Feedback and Questions Updating to CURRENT

Hi Giorgos,

Thanks for your help here!

> You are right that there is a fair bit of improvement we could make to
> the 'make world from scratch' chapter.  I've thought a bit about this
> and I think we need to split this in at least a few more parts:
> 
>     - How to update from X.0-RELEASE to a newer Y.0-RELEASE.
> 
>     - How to upgrade from X.0-RELEASE to RELENG_X (for security updates
>       only).
> 
>     - How to upgrade across major releases (from X.0-RELEASE to some
>       newer Y.0-RELEASE or later code).
> 
>     - How to upgrade from X-STABLE to Y-CURRENT.
> 
> There is inevitably some amount of repetition in these four upgrade
> procedures, but it may be more intuitive to have *all* the steps for
> each one of them in a consecutive section.
> 
> If that sounds like something that would simplify things and make the
> upgrade steps more useful, please help us organize the documentation to
> match a better shape by posting any ideas to freebsd-doc.

That wasn't the issue for me.  My confusion stemmed from the
fact that it was the *same* material just repeated 3 times.
By the time I had read hrough the first set, I was baffled to
stumble onto the second and third set.

I think that if early in the page it had said something like

    Here's the overview of the steps we'll take:...
    In the next section, we'll progress through each
    of these steps in more detail...

> If you upgrade from 7.X-RELEASE to CURRENT it is probably a good idea to
> rebuild all ports with:

Check.  I found the Handbook chapter that covered this.
It's all coming back to me slowly...

>     pkgdb -Fu && portupgrade -fa
> 
> or:
> 
>     portmaster -fa

And confusingly here, there's no indication as to why I might
pick one or the other, nor the pros and cons of either, nor
if having picked one, I could use the other later.

So I set the first of those commands into motion and
went to dinner.

I was totally frustrated to find that some potentially
large portion of that time was wasted waiting for an
interactive response to some question that had a
single-already-checked question that just needed to
be confirmed or unchecked.  Hrm.  

A "use the defaults" configuration for totally non-interactive
build would have been my expectation here.  Will I need to
babysit this whole build now?  Yep.

> Every time you `portsnap fetch' and `portsnap update' you should look at
> `/usr/ports/UPDATING' too.  Some the `UPDATING' file lists important
> upgrade steps that have to be performed manually.

That's the one thing that's been clear so far. :-)

jdl