"Doing the deed" on portupgrade

[Frank Leonhardt]

On 12/04/2012 10:49, Chris Rees wrote:
>> Not knowing very much about this system, I've always been a little confused
>> by the multifarious options in the documentation like this. Listing them in
>> order of preference would help but it'd be nice to start a section like this
>> with the pros and cons of the various strategies about to be outlined . The
>> reason for not using portupgrade is clear; Portmaster looks a good option
>> because it implies it won't drag in every scripting language and module
>> under the sun when you build it (according to the documentation posted). So
>> why would anyone use Portmanager? (Incidentally, I have always used
>> portupgrade, simply because it's first on the list).
>>
> Yes, this section does need improving a little.  My intention here is
> to stop the plethora of people asking for support on portupgrade after
> they've seen it in the Handbook listed first; you have just said that
> the same happened to you :)
>
> If you have such a list, it will be gladly received.
>
> Chris

If you mean a list of sections where it's confusing as to why one would 
choose one from multiple options I'll have a go. Having looked at a few 
I thought existed, I can see that over time the manual has improved a 
great deal in this respect. In fact, I'm not a regular reader of the 
manual (I read it in the 1990's) and a skim through just now proved that 
a lot of good work has been done by you guys! (These days I read man 
pages). The port upgrading is one section of the manual I do keep going 
back to, and I've wondered about the different options for some time.

On a quick glance:

4.9 Shells - "it's a matter of taste". Factually correct but not that 
helpful in isolation (i.e. if you're new to it and have no taste). I'd 
say "Use /bin/sh" as a default because it's the most standard (for 
running scripts and across different platforms) and guaranteed to be 
there on the root partition. I'm aware that discussion on the merits of 
different shells tends to spark a holy war on the subject. It might be 
helpful to point out that you can run one shell for another (I log in 
using /bin/sh but switch to csh most of the time).

4.10 Text Editors - possibly worth pointing out that 'vi' is the 
standard. I tell students they might as well learn it because they won't 
be able to avoid it forever (vipw &c). Eight Megabytes And Constantly 
Swapping doesn't raise the smile it used to.

As to the strategies for disk mirroring, there's been more than one 
listed in the past. I got gmirror working, and stuck with it, but what's 
vinum and should I care? Now there's ZFS too, but I think they're 
mutually exclusive. And then there's HAST. And didn't someone say that 
UFS was obsolete? Or was that vinum. And how exactly do I read ext3 - I 
got it working eventually, once.

(Incidentally, I do know what vinum IS but the only reason I've ever 
looked at it was for mirroring - it might be a better way to go but 
nothing in the manual spelled it out).

But I don't want to sound like I'm moaning on. I've actually bought half 
a dozen new HP Microservers , specifically to experiment with ZFS, HAST 
and all this new file stuff. Naturally, I also plan to write up the results.

Regards, Frank.