Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 19:12:40 -0800 From: Gary Kline <kline@tao.thought.org> To: youshi10@u.washington.edu Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Upgrade suggestion Message-ID: <20070327031239.GB74050@thought.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.43.0703261758280.4053@hymn02.u.washington.edu> References: <d7195cff0703261741u52781b21k9ba3771f9dd674d0@mail.gmail.com> <Pine.LNX.4.43.0703261758280.4053@hymn02.u.washington.edu>
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On Mon, Mar 26, 2007 at 05:58:28PM -0700, youshi10@u.washington.edu wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Mar 2007, illoai@gmail.com wrote:
>
> >On 26/03/07, Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> wrote:
> >>On Mar 26, 2007, at 4:40 PM, Gary Kline wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Hi Folks,
> >>>
> >>> Last night it struck me that one reason I constantly find new
> >>> ports to upgrade is that with ~17K ports, if you're running one
> >>> of the more common desktop managers and several popular apps,
> >>> there are going to be at least a dozen minor tweaks every day.
> >>
> >>Possibly, for a very busy program with multiple authors actively
> >>making changes. Normally, projects accumulate such changes and only
> >>release point version updates perhaps every month or so, and most
> >>have updates available much less often than that.
> >>
> >>> E.g.:going from foo-1.6.7_2 to foo-1.6.7_3.
> >>
> >>Portrevision bumps commonly happen when an underlying dependency
> >>changes; you generally don't get any changes to foo itself, unless
> >>the program version itself changes.
> >>
> >>> I used to run
> >>> port[upgrade|manager] twice/week. Was swamped; recently,
> >>> upgrading things daily. Since a lot of the wm ports take
> >>> > 24 hours to build/re-build, I'm pretty much wedged. Thus
> >>> this suggestion (for all port/package upgrade suites):
> >>> have a flag, say 'u' for "urgent" when *foo*" goes from
> >>> foo-1.6.7 to -1.6.8 or else when/if foo makes a critical
> >>> fix.
> >>
> >>There's an easier way: you can probably wait to rebuild ports until
> >>you see something listed in portaudit's output, or you know you want
> >>to update something being actively used to a specific known version
> >>that you need.
> >>
> >
> >Of course, Gentoo's portage system does all of this.
> >Of course, Gentoo's portage system is a complete
> >labyrinth of configuration files scattered over countless
> >myriads (10^4) of subdirectories so that running a mixture
> >of Holy-and-Blessed Versions and "testing" versions
> >becomes a lovely game of tag combined with memory and
> >$10,000 Pyramid, only fewer bleached-white teeth.
I've run several distros of Linux. Ubuntu is (or *was*) my
favorite; they're getting carried away. ....(IMHO).
> >
> >I think the addition of portaudit for such a huge (~17K ports!)
> >collection (and a much less strenuous upgrade cycle) is an
> >excellent idea.
> >
> >--
> >--
>
> Gentoo is a pain, but it's the only thing I can really run ("stable"-y) on
> my Core 2 Duo box right now (desktop). Not ready to go straight to -CURRENT
> on a desktop, quite yet.. I'll give it 6.2-RELEASE shot in a week.
>
> But anyhow, I do really like ports more, for all of its quirks.. it truly
> is a better (simpler) system to deal with, and as long as some of the stuff
> under the hood gets fixed soon, the better.
For tuning things to your server, compiler, just the way you want
it, yes. I'm still building tests for g**-4.2, and will post
something when I have anything solid.
>
> Oh, but you shouldn't really have to worry about upgrading stuff all the
> time Gary. There's no point in upgrading packages daily -- I used to do
> that in Gentoo and all it did was waste precious CPU cycles and reduce the
> life of my hard disk.
>
> Upgrades once to twice a week do just fine for many systems (unless you're
> purposely running LINT for the entire ports collection -- which doesn't
> exist quite yet :)..).
Lint?!! Good grief, I haven't touched that for years. My
trying-to-keep-current started when I had 6.2 firmly on my backup
DNS server. I figured it would be trivial to have _everything_
current ... and ran smack into the consequences of complexity
theory. I'll chill out and use portaudit! thanks, guys,
gary
>
> -Garrett
>
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--
Gary Kline kline@thought.org www.thought.org Public Service Unix
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