Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 17:58:28 -0700 (PDT) From: youshi10@u.washington.edu To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Upgrade suggestion Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.43.0703261758280.4053@hymn02.u.washington.edu> In-Reply-To: <d7195cff0703261741u52781b21k9ba3771f9dd674d0@mail.gmail.com>
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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 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.
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 :)..).
-Garrett
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