Exploring the updateability of FreeBSD 8.2 -> 12.1

[Rene Ladan]

On Wed, Sep 09, 2020 at 09:40:38AM +0200, rainer at ultra-secure.de wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I may be in a position to have to upgrade a FreeBSD 8.2 host to a 
> supported version (so I can install the latest packages).
> 
> Obviously, this is still with the old pkg_* tools.
> 
> Do I do the conversion at the end (when I'm on 12.1) or at the beginning 
> (when I'm on 9.3)?

I think it is best to do it as early as possible. ports-mgmt/pkg used to
have a script pkg2ng to do this conversion for you but it no longer does.

> 
> I have my own pourdriere package builder and thanks to some hoarding, I 
> think I still have pretty much all the packages even of 9.something, 
> somewhere.
> 
Mmm, perhaps it is a good idea to delete the old-generation packages and
replace them with these cached packages first and then upgrade the OS
and packages?

René