Ports procedure when upgrading (e.g 6.1 >6.3)

[David Southwell]

Hi

I have just upgraded a system from 6.1 to 6.3 on an amd64 system and ran 
across some problems with installed ports that would not work on the upgraded 
system without some careful attention.

I am sure there must be a way of identifying ports that need attention 
follwing a system upgrade. What is the appropriate procedure? I could find no 
mention of this in the Handbook - I probably missed something.

I am sure there must be some other ports I have not attended to properly and 
would like to familarize myself with the correct procedure before upgrading 
once more to 7.0 when I suspect there may be more differences to resolve.

EXAMPLE:
By way of illustration I ran into a problem with perl.  Whilst perl itself 
functioned running cpan r produced errors due to a perceived incompatibility 
between the upgraded platform and an internal documentation system that 
retained references to the old platform. 

The only effective way I found to solve the problem was by deinstalling perl, 
deleting its entire library file structure and then installing perl5.8 from 
scratch. There may have been better ways of doing it but at least I found a 
way that worked.

I had previously tried a make clean, deinstall, make configure, make and make 
install but that did not clear the problem. It would seem that the port 
Makefile does not check whether there has been a change in the platfrom and 
make corresponding essential alterations.

David