How did upgrading applications happen before portupgrade etc?

[Rakhesh Sasidharan]

Kris Kennaway wrote:

>> I'm curious now -- how does portupgrade (that's the tool I know/ use so
>> I'll use that as an example) do its upgrading? I have seen that in case of
>> an upgrade in builds the newer version, uninstalls the previous one (even
>> though it might be required by other apps), and then installs the newer
>> version. How does it do that -- by some magic of its own or does it use
>> the usual ports commands etc?
>
> At the core it uses the usual port commands, but there is a lot of
> higher level logic around that to do things like planning and ordering
> of upgrades and error recovery.

I see. And I suppose that's how it avoids having to uninstall all the 
apps and then re-install them. Neat!

It really came to me as a shock that once upon a time (and even now, those 
who prefer the old fashioned way) you had to actually uninstall all the 
apps and then re-install. I began using FreeBSD with 6.2 and so had taken 
portupgrade to be for granted. Then I happened to read a blog post by a 
NetBSD developer on how he keeps updating applications through pkgsrc, and 
from there I went to the NetBSD Wiki and their page on updating 
applications, and both these articles talk about uninstalling all the apps 
and then installing newer versions etc ... which is when it struck me that 
FreeBSD doesn't seem to have a cumbersome process such as that.

Hats off to portupgrade and other such tools! :-)

Regards,
Rakhesh