Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2007 11:52:41 +1200 From: Mark Kirkwood <markir@paradise.net.nz> To: Bram Moolenaar <Bram@moolenaar.net> Cc: Nikola Lecic <nlecic@EUnet.yu>, Mark Linimon <linimon@lonesome.com>, freebsd-x11@FreeBSD.org, Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org> Subject: Re: Avoiding upgrade to xorg 7.2 Message-ID: <4671D4C9.3020609@paradise.net.nz> In-Reply-To: <200706142107.l5EL7WxN043744@moolenaar.net> References: <200706142107.l5EL7WxN043744@moolenaar.net>
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Bram Moolenaar wrote: > Nikola Lecic wrote: > >> On Thu, 14 Jun 2007 11:42:45 +0200 >> Bram Moolenaar <Bram@moolenaar.net> wrote: >> >>> Glad to hear you have good experiences with the port system. I do >>> wonder how much downtime you have while updating the ports. >> Well, I normally don't have downtime at all. I update ports tree once in >> 1-3 days, which means I have ~10-20 ports to compile (desktop machine, >> ~850 ports installed). I just have to be a bit careful since this >> machine is pretty slow, so I don't miss to 'portversion -v -L =' and >> then: >> >> * I care not to compile openoffice, gimp, etc, use packages then >> * I use to do 'portupgrade -a' overnight (and that's enough) >> * sometimes I find useful to do partial upgrade without stopping any >> running application or my work during daytime (in most cases >> complete upgrade can be done even without turning X off -- but >> examine portversion listing to be sure) >> * if I'm out of home for a week and have to do bigger update, I use >> '-aP', except for several applications with custom options. >> >> That's a routine, like morning coffee, takes <0.5% of time, and _never_ >> failed. >> >> The most important, I'm speaking about my primary everyday desktop >> machine I completely depend on and do all my work on it. > > Amazing. My experiences are quite different. But then, I do need > openoffice, which takes about a whole day to build (and runs out of > diskspace if I forget to clean up first). This failed three times > (files could not be downloaded) before it worked, so it took me five > days to build openoffice last time. > >>> I'm afraid my experiences are not so good. Many times I got stuck >>> halfway a port upgrade and somehow had to manually fix things. I >>> can't risk breaking my machine to a level where X11 won't start. So >>> I'm very careful with updating ports. And I can't wait for a couple >>> of days for builds to finish (not to mention that there is very often >>> something wrong, such as running out of disk space, a file that can't >>> be downloaded, etc.). >> I don't experience such things because my ports tree is always >> up-to-date. But it is normal if you mix old and new packages, of >> course. > > I don't intentionally mix old and new packages. But I sometimes get > stuck with something that can't be uninstalled and have to forcefully > install another version without deinstalling the old one. That's bad > of course, but sometimes there is no reasonable alternative. > > Note that this is a development system, I sometimes need to install > specific versions of autoconf, gtk, motif, etc. And have programs > compiled outside of the ports tree with them, thus can't delete some > ports without breaking these programs. It does mostly work OK, the > ports system is often paranoid about installing two versions of the > same port. > >> I've never experienced such stability (and possibilities) on Linux >> desktop machines (speaking from a very long experience). > > On Linux you can at least often install binary packages. I gave up on > that for FreeBSD some time ago, it caused more problems than building > from source (esp. that specific versions of packages were missing and > building them from source then doesn't work either). Building from > source works better, but is more than 10 times slower. > > One thing that amazes me: "make distclean" in /usr/ports is extremely > slow, since it uses the dependencies and most ports get cleaned dozens > of times. Still need to do that, especially before building openoffice. > >> As of big Xorg upgrade, use '-aP'; it will not take that long. Or even >> better, since you probably has a mess of old and new ports, deinstall >> everything and start anew with a fresh ports tree (again, don't compile >> if a package exists). > > "deinstall everything" is not an option, it means I can't work for a > couple of days. And will mean quite a few things I build outside the > ports tree will stop working. > Can you not kick off an reinstall everything last think on a Friday and have it ready for you on Monday? (you'll need to set BATCH=yes so you don't get asked to confirm config options). I usually do this myself whenever I upgrade (usually every 3 months or so). In most cases you can keep working while the upgrade is happening (e.g I switch to enlightenment while Gnome is rebuilding etc). However in the case of this Xorg 7.2 upgrade and change from X11BASE to LOCALBASE I couldn't really do this, but I think this is not typical (I used a mac powerbook whilst my Freebsd box was rebuilding... glad to be back in Freebsd now!). Note that it's not just Freebsd that is doing modular Xorg 7.x - Gentoo did it a while back. Cheers Mark
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