libtool note in UPDATING

[Ade Lovett]

On Feb 27, 2006, at 14:06 , Christopher Kelley wrote:
> Is there a more straightforward explanation of how to upgrade ports  
> with the new libtool?

That *is* the straightforward way of explaining it :)

libtool is one of a handful of ports that is used so extensively by  
the rest of the tree that providing a one-click method that's going  
to work in every situation is an exercise in futility.  Around 1400  
ports were directly affected by the change, with several hundred more  
having varying degrees of collateral damage (which, as far as I know,  
has all been fixed as of the time of writing).  That's greater than  
10% of the tree as a whole.

Judicious use of portupgrade and its ilk may certainly work in your  
case, but there are absolutely no guarantees that something,  
somewhere, in the rebuild will go wrong, and result in a rather  
messed up set of packages on the system.

If you want to be absolutely, positively sure, I'm afraid there is  
only one simple solution, involving the archival of any configuration  
files that may have been changed locally, followed by saving off a  
list of the ports/packages installed on the system, then "rm -rf /var/ 
db/pkg/* /usr/local /usr/X11R6 /usr/compat/*" and building everything  
from scratch.  I tested both this method, and the portupgrade method,  
on two identically configured scratch boxes with a few hundred ports  
installed on both, and the sledgehammer approach was in fact  
considerably faster.

> Also, will 6.1-RELEASE have this change already in the ports tree  
> that it ships with?

Yes.  This also offers a third solution.  Wait until 6.1-RELEASE  
comes out, along with its associated package sets, and do a clean  
install from there.  Ditto for 5.5-RELEASE if there is some reason to  
keep a machine on the 5.x branch as opposed to jumping to 6.x

-aDe