From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu May 23 01:10:13 2013 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.FreeBSD.org [8.8.178.115]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 66FFA2F9 for ; Thu, 23 May 2013 01:10:13 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from freebsd@edvax.de) Received: from mx01.qsc.de (mx01.qsc.de [213.148.129.14]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 17FF0692 for ; Thu, 23 May 2013 01:10:12 +0000 (UTC) Received: from r56.edvax.de (port-92-195-231-35.dynamic.qsc.de [92.195.231.35]) by mx01.qsc.de (Postfix) with ESMTP id 24C263CD09; Thu, 23 May 2013 03:10:04 +0200 (CEST) Received: from r56.edvax.de (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by r56.edvax.de (8.14.5/8.14.5) with SMTP id r4N1AEPp002180; Thu, 23 May 2013 03:10:14 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from freebsd@edvax.de) Date: Thu, 23 May 2013 03:10:14 +0200 From: Polytropon To: Ed Flecko Subject: Re: Keeping my system up to date with CTM or subversion? Message-Id: <20130523031014.dc466e20.freebsd@edvax.de> In-Reply-To: References: Organization: EDVAX X-Mailer: Sylpheed 3.1.1 (GTK+ 2.24.5; i386-portbld-freebsd8.2) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list Reply-To: Polytropon List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 23 May 2013 01:10:13 -0000 On Wed, 22 May 2013 13:23:39 -0700, Ed Flecko wrote: > So once you have a system up and running, how do you monitor if and when > you need to upgrade your ports tree? This highly depends on your "updating policy". There are three mainstream opinions: a) always update, regularly (e. g. once a week) b) only update if security requires it (e. g. when portaudit alerts) c) update as soon as an additional functionality is desired Of course, "combined opinions" are also valid. :-) For updating the ports tree, portsnap is the eaiest tool. However, if you follow opinion a) and update _very_ regularly (e. g. daily), you could use SVN to obtain the (smaller) deltas to your local tree. This also helps because you can directly access the tree and don't have to wait until a snapshot is made available. For "higher update frequencies", this is often the better approach. There is another valid opinion: Install once, make sure everything works, never touch a running system. I'm a big fan of this attitude, at least on my home systems. ;-) > By the way, your ports tree is different than installed software packages, > right? That is possible when you update your ports tree (by whatever method) _after_ you have installed something. A typical conclusion is that you might need to rebuild stuff as soon as you install something with that (newer) tree. Example: Tree is at version 12345, you install foo-1.0 which depends on bar-1.5. Two weeks later, you update your ports tree and get version 23456. You don't want to touch foo and bar, but you now need to install baz which requires bar-1.6 (which has now arrived in the tree). So now you need to update bar from 1.5 to 1.6, and _maybe_ also foo to a newer version (whatever that might be). > In other words, the only reason people even bother to upgrade their > ports tree is so that IF you install a package from source - the source is > current? Is that correct? Maybe the wording is a bit strange, but yes, updating the ports tree means to have the lastest and _consistent_ versions of all the programs in the tree (so their "interconnections" will work properly). This is also helpful when you install from different sources, e. g. some stuff from source, some stuff as binary packages from Latest/. > When security vulnerabilities are discovered and patches released by FBSD, > the patch will tell you what steps you need to take to apply the patch and > stay up to date, won't it? The OS patches are announced that way. You should always read the UPDATING files in /usr/src (for the OS) and /usr/ports (for installed applications) to make sure you're not missing a simple (but important) step during upgrades. Patches for the OS are of course handled independently from those applying to applications from the ports collection. -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...