Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 20:16:31 -0800 From: James Long <stable@museum.rain.com> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org, Pete French <petefrench@ticketswitch.com> Subject: Re: New ports on older stable (4.11) Message-ID: <20060302041631.GA27435@ns.museum.rain.com> In-Reply-To: <20060301120110.E8E2B16A425@hub.freebsd.org> References: <20060301120110.E8E2B16A425@hub.freebsd.org>
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> Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 11:05:13 +0000 > From: Pete French <petefrench@ticketswitch.com> > Subject: New ports on older stable (4.11) > To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org > Message-ID: <E1FEP8r-0008Qr-IY@dilbert.firstcallgroup.co.uk> > > I dont know how backward compatible ports are ggenerally, but I > have a 4.11 machine that I really want to upgrade the ports on. > But I dont know if they will alla ctually compile, and I dont wnat to > start doing the process only to find that I cant build one of them > possibly. Does anybody know if this is likely to work, or is it > simply unsupported ? > > I;d love to upgrade the machine to 6.1 - but I have no physical access to > it, nor am I likely to get any for the forseeable future, and upgrading > across the 4/5 boundary isn't something I would be happy doing remotiley > in multi-user mode (if it's even possible!) > > -pcf. This is rather a case of the extremely near-sighted leading the blind, but I recently inherited the care of some older boxen, and in fact, recently deployed a new 4.11 installation, and proceeded to build up-to-date ports on it. I still share a part of your trepidation about getting oneself into a bind with uncooperative dependencies, etc. However, I have had more success than I would have imagined. Here are some suggestions, and I certainly welcome corrections to my advice from more expert sources. Start by backing up your /usr/ports and your /var/db/pkg and /var/db/ports and anything else you can think of. Heck, back up the whole samn dystem if you can. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the universe is a lot safer if you have a backup. I should think portaudit would be the first thing you'd want to install, so that you can find out if other ports have security problems. Go slow, read Makefiles first, that sort of thing. You can probably install portupgrade without too much trouble, as it doesn't have a lot of dependencies. Then a lot of use of portupgrade -nR (portname) will tell you which ports have the fewest dependencies, and -nr (portname) will tell you which ports depend on any given port you may be thinking about upgrading. Just for prurient interest, would you care to post your pkg_info? If you have portupgrade installed, or can install it, how about the output from "portupgrade -na" also. Jim
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