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Date:      Mon, 29 May 2006 19:42:43 -0400
From:      Joe <dev@freedomcircle.net>
To:        questions@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   pkg_upgrade?
Message-ID:  <447B86F3.6070500@freedomcircle.net>

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Hi,

I've read the documentation and it seems there's no pkg_upgrade or 
pkg_update, or a way to install an updated/upgraded package.  I'd like 
to determine if that is indeed the case.

I installed 6.0-RELEASE from a CD and then installed such packages as 
X.org and Firefox (using pkg_add -r).  That gave me, for example, the 
latest Firefox that was available for 6.0-RELEASE, i.e., 1.0.7, but I 
wanted to install 1.5.  However, when I downloaded the 1.5 .tbz from 
ftp.freebsd.org and tried to use pkg_add on it, it complained that 
Firefox was already installed.

I then decided to upgrade the OS to 6.1-RELEASE via ftp by using 
sysinstall.  AFAICT, the upgrade of the base system went OK (except for 
the fact that /etc/motd and uname still refer to 6.0-RELEASE).  However, 
the installation of X.org packages did not go well, starting with errors 
in trying to install the expat package.

The documentation mentions portupgrade and portmanager as mechanisms to 
upgrade ports, but if I'm not mistaken these invoke source updates, not 
a binary upgrade as was done for the OS.  It appears that the only way 
to upgrade in binary form is to use pkg_delete -f to remove each 
package, e.g., expat 1.98, and then pkg_add to get the newer (2.0) 
version.  And then you have to be extra careful with dependencies 
between packages.

I don't have any major problems with upgrading from sources (assuming 
they build cleanly as expected), but I wanted to explore the binary 
upgrading route first to determine how easy it would be for someone 
without much technical abilities to install FreeBSD and some user 
packages and maintain it without getting involved in recompiling sources.

Thanks for your assistance.

Joe



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