Ports system quality

[Oliver Fromme]

Alexander Leidinger wrote:
 > Quoting Oliver Fromme <olli at lurza.secnetix.de> (from Fri, 2 Sep 2011  
 > 11:24:16 +0200 (CEST)):
 > 
 > > The other extreme are people who run a cron job every night
 > > that updates /usr/ports (*) and runs "400.status-pkg" (from
 > > /etc/periodic/weekly), possibly even followed by an automated
 > > update (**).  Of course this will sometimes break.  That's
 > > normal and to be expected, because the ports collection is
 > > changed and modified constantly by many people, except during
 > > freeze.  There is always something that's broken.  If you're
 > > affected, you need to postpone the update of the respective
 > > ports until someone (possibly including yourself) unbreaks it.
 > > That's the price to pay when you want to be on the "bleeding
 > > edge" instead of waiting for the next freeze and updating the
 > > ports to the release tag only.
 > 
 > No,

Yes, it is.  :-)

 > that's the price to pay if you do not use all available tools.  
 > Personally I make a FS snapshot before updating. We should recomment  
 > to do this in all sensible places, and maybe even add code to  
 > portmaster/portupgrade which tells to make a snapshot if there is none  
 > (where possible). This way a rollback to a known good state is  
 > possible if someone gets hit by an instability (someone still can get  
 > hit, but the impact is a lot lower). Yes, I know that ZFS (the FS  
 > where it is very easy to snapshot and rollback) is not used  
 > everywhere, but the new installer for 9.0 offers now the possibility  
 > and we should tell the people what is possible now.

I wrote that the price to pay is that you have to postpone
the update of respective ports.  And this is true, no matter
if you use snapshots or not (or something else).

Having to roll back to a working system is a problem that
I didn't talk about at all.  Snapshots can be used for this,
of course.  Personally I cannot use snapshots, but I keep
packages of all working ports (created with "make package"
or "pkg_create -b"), so I can easily roll back if necessary.
However, that happens very rarely because I watch the mailing
lists carefully before updates, so I notice in advance if
there is any major breakage.

Best regards
   Oliver

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